Fear and Consequences

I've been thinking a lot about fear lately; partly due to the fact that I decided to jump out of a plane and partly because I went camping.

I am not afraid to camp, I actually quite enjoy it – being out in nature, the peacefulness, chopping wood – but there is one hitch; I am afraid of the dark, or more specifically, things that go bump in the night, or rather, when it comes to camping - things that go "grrrrr" in the night.

You see, I’m rather afraid I’ll be eaten by bears if I leave my tent in the middle of the night.

Now this wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night and have to answer the call of nature (and potentially face the wrath of nature). But unfortunately, on the two nights we were camping, I awoke in the wee small hours and needed to, um, well, take a wee.

So I would lie awake for awhile; listening for bears and trying to conversely; summon up the courage to go out into the dark and convince myself that if I could just go back to sleep for a couple of hours it would be daylight and safe to go out. Alas, after twenty or so minutes of debate, my bladder was wide awake and demanding satisfaction; so grabbing my jacket and my flashlight I left the safety of the tent for the unknown darkness of the trees adjacent to our campsite.

I furtively looked around and listened, seeing nothing and hearing only the snoring of my tent mate (sorry C, but the truth must be told) I found a suitable spot and turned out my flashlight and did what needed to be done (I will spare you the details – I know, you can thank me later for my prudence).

Mission accomplished I quick-stepped it back to the “safety” of the tent and scrambled under the covers and, once my pulse stopped racing and I calmed down sufficiently, I went back to sleep (about an hour after first waking with the need to pee).

I’m annoyed by this rather irrational fear of the dark. There were no warnings of bears in the area, the chances of me coming face to face (or cheek to cheek) with a bear were remote and yet I wasted an hour of contented sleep fretting about the imagined marauding wildlife.

C congratulated me for overcoming my fear, but I didn’t overcome it – I just found that my need to pee outweighed my need to stay safe in the tent (little more than an imagined safety, really, if a bear really wanted to munch on me a thin tent and a bit of bedding really wasn’t going to deter it much).

But maybe that’s the point; you overcome fear by realizing that the consequences of giving in to fear are far graver than just facing the fear (and trust me, with a full bladder, the consequences would have been rather dire).

When I faced my fear of falling from great heights to my death by committing to a tandem jump with my friend T, I realized at some stage that the consequences of giving in to my irrational fear of dying during the jump would have been that both C and T would have wasted their time coming out to the drop zone and though I could get my money back, I had driven out to the airport twice (over an hour each way) and gasoline is not cheap these days. Also, and here I have to give a nod to my ol’ buddy Ego – to back out (after telling everyone I was going to do it) would have been embarrassing and hard to justify so since I had committed.

I just realized this approach of pros and cons of fear and consequences is not just related to fear and consequences but can also be applied to all aspects of my behaviour – do the pros of sticking to the status quo outweigh the cons of sticking to it.

Interesting – who knew so much would come out of waking in the wee small hours in need of a wee.