Inky Blackness
Fear often is simply being out of control and not knowing what’s going to happen. Like when you walk into a dark room, or you are going on a blind date, or you decide to eat that leftover meat that’s been in the fridge. When did we have that dinner? Will it make me sick? Or just delirious and I’ll be doing Barbra Streisand karaoke on the coffee table while talking to Obi-wan? We don’t like to be out of control. We like to see what’s coming at us so we can deal with it.
I took my 12 year old daughter on a pre-dawn bicycle ride on a paved trail this morning. I’ve got a cool new tail light that I was itching to use and she saw it as an adventure and wanted to conquer it.
I turned on my four year old headlight that gives us an ok view about 20 feet in front of us and off we went at 6:40am. We rolled down the road to the trail intersection while the street lights cast long shadows of us as we got farther away from them. Once we got to the trail I had her stop and we looked down the path. Normally we see the pavement go off into the distance. We see another cyclist, or runners, or someone walking with their dog. This time we saw nothing. Just inky blackness.
We’ve had problems in the past with bears getting into our garbage during the night. And (you guessed it) our garbage was hit last night. So for all we knew there could be a bear somewhere along the trail just waiting for us to startle him so he could scare the puddin’ out of us. Or worse…
Fear of the unknown. You’re out of control. You can only see what’s right in front of you.
So there we were on the trail, staring into the abyss. My daughter’s eyes were wide with fear and I could hear it in her voice. She swallowed and said she was ready to face it. I smiled and we started forward.
We came upon a couple of other cyclists. A couple of runners. After 20 minutes we could start to see the trail in the distance. After 30 minutes my headlight wasn’t really helping our visibility. No bears, no killer armadillo, not even any squirrels. Just the breeze on our faces and the sounds of the early birds singing their songs to welcome the new day.
She conquered the darkness. I was very proud of her. I was a little nervous myself, but this is not the type of thing that bothers me much. And it always helps to have someone face the fear with you.
