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Hello! I know I'm sitting on a mountain's edge with a book about fear in the above photo, but I want to explain that this was no attempt to equate fear of physical danger with other fears. There’s an important difference. Fear of physical danger is, to some degree, worth heeding. However, most of our fears — like telling someone how we really feel, putting our art out into the world for all to see, or other non-life-threatening ideas that cause our palms to sweat and hearts to pound — we actually want to move towards those fears. Because fear is letting us know those things matters to us. Long ago, fear was perhaps best used as an alarm or avoidance system. But today (barring rare cases of exceptional physical danger), fear is better used as a compass. Today, fear helps us figure out not what not to do, but what to do. If we follow our fears, our lives are sure to be filled with meaning and excitement. If we steer clear of our fears, we risk our lives becoming lifeless, meaningless, and really boring. It has been one year and twelve late night letters since the coronavirus pandemic began. At that time, I was in hot pursuit of one of my great fears by learning to fly airplanes. You see, I was very much afraid of heights as a kid. I tried to avoid amusement parks because I always wound up sheepishly waiting for my friends by the exit gate of roller coasters. My knees would buckle from under me anywhere near the edge of mountains. My whole life, I’ve waged a private war against my fear of heights by climbing progressively bigger and scarier mountains, taking up rock climbing (the entire activity occurs on the edge of tall things), and most recently, last year’s escapade into flying airplanes. Pushing into my fear of heights consumes and excites the hell out of me. My greatest fears, though, actually have to do with this website: In the beginning, the thought of writing and sharing things that mattered to me on the internet simultaneously drew me like a moth to light and scared me with the roar of a thousand suns. My senior year of college, I bought a web address, built a blog, wrote half a dozen articles, and then deleted everything. I never even launched it. I was sure I would be laughed straight off the internet. A year later, I bought another web address, built another blog, wrote another half dozen articles, and finally worked up the courage to launch it. That was this website, originally dubbed “The Living Theory.”
A few years ago, I plugged GO. A Ridiculously Useful Guide to Cheap Unconventional Travel into the Free eBooks section of Reddit. In 48 hours, the number of people subscribed to these letters jumped from 950 to over 2,000. I know typing words and sending them to people, whether five or five million, as an act, is the exact same thing, but I deeply dreaded that next letter. I was sure a deep, authoritarian God voice would call me out before the world and proclaim “No Ethannn!!! You have gone too far. Your words are worthless and your letters are unworthy of 2,000 subscribers."
The day WONDER WANDER 2018 began, I was so nervous I almost fainted when I got out of the car on a quick trip up the road to grab some last-minute supplies for the gathering. I felt the gig was up, I was finally going to be found out to be a fraud now that these people who read my writing were meeting me in person.
In this way, I’ve always known this website, these letters, and gatherings are things I’m “meant to do” as much as I’m “meant to do” anything. Beyond infatuation with ideas or how effortlessly I lock into that single-minded flow state when doing these “website things,” it is my irrational fear around these things that assures me of their supreme importance to my being. On and on, we have to keep pursuing the fear. Once we get acquainted with something we are afraid of, we tend to lose our fear of it. And so we have to go even further if we are to encounter fear again. This is the process we refer to as “expanding your comfort zone.” I no longer fear publishing words on the web, writing a letter to 2,000 people (this one is actually going out to over 3,000 for the first time this month!), and am quite sure I won’t faint with fear if I host another WONDER WANDER event one of these days. Because I've become aquatinted with these acts. I’ve gotten used to them. I have driven the fear further back. Pondering all this tonight, I realize I need some more fear in my life (and the excitement and meaning that comes with it). I’ve gotten comfortable during the pandemic and haven’t stepped forward into the fear for too long. My life just isn’t ringing with excitement and meaning like it did pre-covid. This is obviously at least in part due to social distancing and an overall lack of opportunity during this time, but being honest with myself, I have also used the pandemic and its inertia as an excuse to avoid encountering those next layers fear. Feeling forward, in this way, the next steps become clear. If we want to live rich lives full of excitement and meaning, facing fear is not just a hurdle along the way, it is they way. Or, as Joseph Campbell more profoundly put it: “the cave you fear to enter hold’s the treasure you seek.” Look to your fear compass and get after it this month! With love & stoke, Ethan
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