Confessions of a Lifelong Coward

I’m forty years old, and I’ve gone through a lot of changes in that time. I think most of the changes that I’ve gone through have been good ones, but I also think that I was a very basic and uninteresting teenager. 

I was a theater kid and I didn’t drink or smoke—this version of me couldn’t imagine getting a tattoo, and I have one with at least 2 more planned. When those things first changed, I thought it was a good thing to shed them. Now at forty, I think it’s fine that I outgrew those things, but it took me a while to start doing the things that I think make my life richer.

My religious beliefs, my political beliefs, even the amount of children I want, have all changed in the last twenty years. I like these changes, and think they have helped my perspective on life, but I don’t think they have enriched my life either. It’s the experiences that I’ve been able to try that have started to enrich my life.

The first crack in my ‘vanilla’ life, was within my love of cinema. When I was a kid, I liked Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, and other popcorn flicks—and I still love those. But I had a friend who challenged me, he thought I was too into ‘escapism’ and started showing me Stanley Kubrick movies, and Memento, and Seven. He introduced me to the art of cinema. This lead to a life of going to see Metropolis with an accompanying orchestra, seeing four-five hour long ‘road show’ art films, like Grindhouse, The Hateful Eight, and Che. It lead to experiences, that I remember as much as the films.

A decade later, I graduated college, and I had free time, and I started to really read. But unlike when I had read for fun as a kid, I started wanting to see what I had missed. I had gone to catholic school and so my assigned reading hadn’t really been based in the books that ‘everyone’ has to read. So I read The Great Gatsby and loved it; The Catcher In the Rye and didn’t get the hype; The Bell Jar and felt seen. 

It was also during this time, that I started reading the books that most people weren’t assigned, the ones that people discovered, and often discovered before they were fully adults. I read On The Road—I was far too old to enjoy this. But the one that I read that started to spawn another change in me, was Into the Wild. I was reading Into the Wild when I became a father, and it is not lost on me that a perspective on my lifestyle changed at the same time my life was having the biggest change ever.

I didn’t want to die like Christopher McCandless, but his story inspired me. If I had read the book at seventeen or eighteen, would I have gone on a grand tramping adventure? I had traveled a little bit as a child, but Into The Wild made me want to see America, to experience it.

I have traveled a lot through America, I’ve been to thirty eight states, and I plan on going to all of them. But after reading Into The Wild, I’ve read more books that have encouraged this spirit of adventure, Walking to Listen and Walking Across America, making me want to savor my experience seeing America, not just check things off like a list. 

Then I read Into Thin Air, and I have zero desire to climb Everest, and if you read that book and makes you want to climb, you’re more adventurous than me. Into Thin Air, made me recognize the uniqueness of certain experiences, and the idea of stopping and taking stock in those experiences. Krakauer doesn’t hold back from the cost of what happened, but there is a good amount of time spent in the preparation of that experience.

Between Into Thin Air and To Shake the Sleeping Self, I saw the idea of a grand transformative experience come into view. It wasn’t about getting to the summit of Everest, or the southern most point of Patagonia, but getting there, and doing it right.

Last night, I was watching The Devil’s Climb, the story of Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell riding their bikes from Colorado to The Devil’s Thumb in Alaska, and climbing it. And there was a moment, when they’re on one of the smaller peaks, only a couple feet for them to each sit and rest for a moment and look out at the view. 

Watching it, from their phone camera, and accompanying drone shots, I realized that there is a certain perspective that I will never be able to get. Without pushing my own boundaries there are a lot of those things I won’t experience, but even if I do, I’ll never be able to climb and see that. It comes with too high a cost, one that I’m not willing to pay.

I have done things that have pushed my comfort, but ultimately things where I knew I would be ok. I’ve gone parasailing, I’ve hiked a couple of spots that intimidated me, I’ve looked over the edge into Canyonland National Park. Things that made my stomach flip-flop, and things that made me feel as if I were going to puke. But I do want to do more. 

I want to hike the Walk of the Gods in Italy, do a full hike up to Machu Picchu, I want to raft down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. If I thought I had the time, I think I’d even like to through hike the Appalachian trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m pretty deathly afraid of riding my bike on roads, but when the Great American Rail Trail is complete, I think it would be amazing to bike across it.

I think I can have some of these experiences, maybe all of them, and never be too afraid of death. These don’t feel like particularly brave, or stupid things to do. But there is a part of me that worries, that I’m too much of a coward. Because what these kind of things do require is a change of lifestyle. I’m afraid of the prolonged discomfort that these adventures, or prepping for them may require.