Real Fear

When I got married everyone said that I was going to get fat. I didn’t. Then, when I hit 30, everybody said that I was going to get fat. I didn’t. Now that we’ve got a baby on the way everybody is making a new prediction: “Your lifestyle is going to totally change!” Well . . . maybe.
There are things about my life that will almost certainly change. In fact, they’re already changing. I don’t ride the scooter as much, for example. Not that I think that it’s inherently all that much more dangerous that driving the car, but as I don’t have life insurance yet, I try to minimize my two wheel excursions. That’s another thing: I’m looking in to some life insurance. I like the idea of Gisella and the baby and Zelda getting a pile of cash if I get crunched by a bus or fall off a cliff or have a heart attack or buy it in one of the other billion ways to go.
I think that that’s my main point. There are a billion and one or two ways to go. Maybe you live in the safest town on the planet. Maybe you’ve got a nice new house and a reinforced, top of the line crash tested Volvo that you drive 2 miles to work through no traffic. Unfortunately, you like to eat and keel over at 45 from a heart attack. So it goes. Or maybe you work out every day, weigh ten pounds less that average, and eat nothing but tofu and carrots. Unfortunately, you eat some bad spinach and die from e. coli. So it goes. Or maybe you avoid bacteria-laden vegetables but like to smoke. Unfortunately, you’re dumb , and die of lung cancer. (S.I.G) Maybe you’re a healthy non-smoking, non-motorcycle riding, spinach avoiding guy, but you happen to live on the West Coast and get nuked by the North Koreans. (And the little bird sings "Pooteeweet.")
So when you think about it, there’s really nothing to be scared about because we’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of when. (Better later than sooner, you’re probably thinking. Good point.) Death, while sucky, shouldn’t be something that we’re constantly worried about.
There are a lot of things that do really scare me. I don’t want to go into the obvious ones like being completely paralyzed or being buried alive. Those are easy. It’s the less obvious things that we really have to watch out for – the things that, while they might not actually lead to our deaths, might lead to a loss of life.
I used to work for an expedition company. Every summer, we would take teenagers on these extended camping trips in Washington state. I worked with a lot of interesting people. Most of them worked the job seasonally and lived out of their cars. In the winter they were ski instructors, and in the spring waiters and waitresses. Or maybe they used the few thousand dollars a year that they made to travel around the world (It’s amazing where you can go when you don’t have a house or a car payment). Anyway, there was one young lady who worked with us who didn’t come from the restaurants or the ski resorts; rather, she was an investment banker. I always admired the fact that she was willing to spend the few days of vacation that she got each year with a bunch of kids camping out in the woods. Still, I couldn’t understand why she was so interested in working so many hours just to make money. When I asked her about it, out conversation went something like this:
“So, why do you spend so much time working and making money?”
“Well, I think that it’s so important to provide for your family.”
“But you don’t have a family . . . “
“But I will one day.”
“But wouldn’t it be better to have less money but more time to spend with your kids?”
“Well, maybe. But what are you going to do if one of them gets sick and only a certain kind of operation will save them, but you can’t afford it?”
“Good point . . .”
For a while, I couldn’t find a good answer to her remark. It bothered me. Here I was going around and saying that having a lot of money didn’t matter when, in fact, if I didn’t earn a lot of money, my family would die of some rare, but operable illnesses that I couldn’t afford to get treated. It sort of makes sense if you think about it only from a caregiver’s point of view. Then I started thinking about my own father. I appreciated the fact that he was around a lot, even though he didn’t have a lot of money. In fact, as a kid, I would have been horrified to know that he had wasted his whole life just to earn enough money to try to save me from every possible means of buying it – something that I now know is impossible anyway.
So while I have to admit that the idea of death holds a modicum of fear for me, my real fear consists not of dying, but of not really living. That's real fear. I'm not going to spend my time trying to live forever. I'm going to enjoy myself and try to keep my head above water. It's the balance that counts. A little money, a little time. A little scooter a little car. A little life, and eventually, hopefully somewhere far down the line, a little death.
So it goes.