Fearless

Fearless. That word carries with it a heavy weight. No one is totally fearless and to profess to be is to open yourself up to scrutiny and rampant testing of your proclamation. Everyone is afraid of something. Sometimes it’s irrational: I once met a girl who was terrified of clowns and nuns. Nuns? She explained it was because she couldn’t see their feet. Okaaaaay. I have an almost irrational fear of spiders, and if one gets on me I will almost dissolve in tears. That is of course after the shrieking and spastic limb thrusting that can only be described as horrifying in it’s own right. Other fears are not so irrational: Fear of losing a loved one or dying alone. Most of these fears are purely psychological, centered around an idea, rather than a physical manifestation. People die. Everyone in fact. Therefore, to fear death is based on a logical and tangible conclusion that everyone will die and either you will be left to mourn them, or they will be left to mourn you and take care of the things you may have left undone.

At dinner last night, the topic of conversation was what to do on our four day pass coming up in a week or two. Some people are flying home from Mississippi to Oregon to spend a few more days with family. I thought I might rent a car and check out Biloxi or head over to Gulf Shores, Alabama and check out the beach. Heck, Bourbon Street in New Orleans is only an hour and a half drive. I could always save my money that I would spend on hotels and head up to Clarksville, Tennessee and stay with my in-laws for a few days. The possibilities are endless. One girl was saying how she wanted to go home, but the plane fare was too expensive. I asked her where home was and she stated she was from Georgia. I told her she could rent a car and drive, and she looked at me as if I’d suddenly sprouted a third eye. “BY MYSELF?!?!?”, she practically shrieked at me. “Why not?”

Why not ? indeed. Some say my Mother is a flake. A restless soul. A gypsy. Never staying in one place too long as if my sister and I were growing up in the witness protection program. It was not an unusual thing to come home from school to find boxes half packed and Mom cheerily packing them full of her antiques, or grumbling about how on Earth we had acquired so many dishes. We were lucky to have the opportunity to go back to school and clean out our desks, and then we were off to a new town with new friends and a new home. We would drive, singing Randy Travis songs until Mom was tired. We would pull into a rest stop and catch a few hours sleep and hit the road again. The open road isn’t something that scares me. In fact, most of the time it bores me. Without stopping to see the sights and attractions that every little town inevitably touts as its claim to fame, the road is just a ribbon of winding asphalt carving its way through mountains and forests, high deserts and prairie.

Maybe it’s because of the fact that I grew up with the gypsy spirit that is my Mother taking us to exciting destinations like…. Oklahoma that I’m not afraid of losing my way. My Mother would marvel at me when I was a young teenager deciding I NEEDED to go to London Underground in Downtown Portland to check out those Doc Martens I HAD to have. She refused to drive me. I didn’t ever bother to ask. It’s well known my Mother HATES driving in Portland. It’s one of her irrational fears. So, with no more than three dollars in change in my pocket, I would hop on the Tri-Met bus that would take me from Hillsboro into Downtown Portland to wander the streets until it was time to head home. At fifteen I would walk the blocks, checking out the stores and shops, the people and the places and marveling at the architecture. If I needed to go elsewhere, I would just hop on another bus, always comfortable in the knowledge that (almost) all buses lead back to Downtown Portland. My Mother said I was fearless.

Now, nearly twenty years later, I still try to embrace the spirit of adventure everywhere I go. I want to see and explore every place I am. It doesn’t matter the reason I’m going, just that I’m there, and I want to make the most of it. Maybe that’s the secret to being fearless. Maybe it isn’t sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop, maybe it’s looking at your life, exactly how it is and determining to make the most of it. Explore your life, explore your city, see things that you’ve never seen before and do things you’ve never done before. Find the joy in everything, and spend each day doing something worthwhile. Nobody gets out of life alive, so spend your time here wisely. Now if I could just come up with an anti-spider force field…