One day I will be able to commute on a bike or on foot, but until then programs like This American Life get me through my forty minute daily drive. A recent episode (494: Hit the Road) featured the story of 23-year old Andrew Forsthoefel who decided to walk across america, Pennsylvania to San Francisco, to listen to people's stories and see what they would tell their 23-year-old selves (you can find more about his story and the stories of the people he met along the way at walkingtolisten.com).
Andrew's story made me think about the many nuances of fear. First of all, because it takes a lot of guts to walk across America, and secondly because of a message he heard more than once in his travels. All across the country complete strangers took him into their homes and fed him. Then, sometimes, they would warn him to be wary (or fearful) of the people in the next town; when he arrived there the people would be equally welcoming and generous. Andrew's experiences have a lot to teach us about fear, and even if we don't decide to walk 4000 miles, his story can remind us to examine how we approach fear in our own lives.
Half of my family is Sicilian, so you could say fear is my birthright. Sicily has a long history of violent invasions, and during my great grandmother's life the danger from organized crime was very real. It was a danger I could hear in her broken english as a small child, but growing up in cushy suburban America it was not something I ever experienced. Still the threat of danger felt very real because the message I was receiving was to be wary of 'those people' out there. The crazies. We all hear about them on the news and in email forwards with lots of capital letters and exclamation points. BEWARE!!!
First of all, fear is an important emotion because it provides us with information that we use to preserve our life, right? There are very primal fears that we all have in common, like, say, an eight foot grizzly bear charging at 30 miles per hour towards us. Then there are learned fears that we pick up from our families, culture, and media. There is a sanskrit word, Maya, that has multiple complicated definitions, but for our purposes we will translate simply as 'illusion'. Maya refers to the illusion of misperceiving reality and coming to false conclusions. In other words, when we fool ourselves into believing something that simply isn't true. Like, for example, that fat-free sugar-free processed chocolate pudding is good for us because it is fat-free and sugar-free; we know better than that, but with the right marketing and enough of a chocolate craving we can justify it.
Let's get back to fear, which can also be marketed, albeit with the best intentions, by the people who care about us and want to keep us safe. Here's a totally fictional example: as a child your grandfather had a friend named Mary who convinced him to skate on ice that was too thin, so he fell into the water and consequently almost drowned. He might teach you to beware of thin ice (a reasonable conclusion), but he might also teach you that all little girls named Mary intend to drown you (a less reasonable conclusion). Can you see how your subsequent fear of little girls named Mary would be an illusion based on the misperception of reality? Leaving grandpa and Mary behind, if Andrew had listened to the warnings of his well-intentioned new found friends about the people in neighboring towns he may never have made it to San Francisco.
There could be a million different reasons people in one town are fearful of those in another, but I think one of them is intolerance. Isn't intolerance a little bit about the fear of the unknown? When someone has different beliefs than us, it can be scary because it turns our world upside down; everything we believe to be true and thus stable may not be true in that other person's world, so the ground shifts because our truth isn't capital 'T' Truth, it's just a version of the truth. When we are faced with new beliefs and truths, we may not understand them right away, so we can't tell if we feel safe around them. Fear can be learned, but it can also pop up when we face a totally new situation that we aren't certain of yet. As it turns out, Andrew did make it to San Francisco. His willingness to face new experiences and to listen to and learn about many different beliefs and perspectives allowed him to make an incredible web of friends across the country. New situations can be scary, but they can also give us the opportunity to open up and learn something new about ourselves and others, which really only makes us stronger. Tolerance really isn't that threatening, huh?
Road tripping (in a vehicle, not on foot) has been my vacation of choice since I was seventeen and I somehow convinced my parents to allow me and my best friend to drive south to New Orleans. On that trip I met my first of a long list of 'road trip angels.' Andrew's story was so interesting to me for another reason: I have encountered the same generosity of spirit and kind heartedness every time I've been on the road, which is inspiring isn't it? Because how often do we hear about strangers supporting each other with open arms and sharing a little piece of life? Somewhere in Arkansas my friend and I clumsily set up a tent in a deserted camp ground; we were young and more than a little freaked out by the strange pick up truck that kept circling by our tiny tent. As it started to get dark a camper pulled up a few sites down from ours and an older woman hopped out and began to build a fire. There was something comforting about the firelight and we eventually fell asleep after a lot of sleepy whispering. The next morning we discovered the ladies in the camper were retired widows driving across country and joyfully diving into new adventures like white water rafting. We also learned that they took turns at the fire all night to watch over our tent. Our paranoia about the pick up truck may have been an illusion, but the ladies in the camper were very real.
At one point in Andrew's story when he is almost to San Francisco he is camping in the woods next to the highway. As he looked at the cars whizzing by he realized that the people in the cars might glance into the dark forest and think it was scary, but he was in the woods and he wasn't afraid. That is the 'aha!' moment I would like to apply to life. We are all, figuratively, in the woods, and we may discover that it just isn't all that scary. Can we let go of fear that is limiting instead of protecting us? Can we soften our intolerances and learn to listen to different perspectives with an open mind instead of trepidation? Can we apply our real life experiences to how we view our deep down conditioned fears? How much of our fear is fueled by illusion and our inability to move past intolerance? I don't know, but it's something to think about. Healthy fear strives to keep us safe, but unhealthy fear can keep us from experiences that enrich our lives in unimaginable ways.