Answer to every “aren’t you scared?” question.
Fear, Afraid, Scared, Second thoughts. We all are asked at some point in our life this question- “aren’t you scared?”, some might face it quite often some might face is rarely.
As a trek leader and adventure enthusiast, I face it quite often, whenever I am jumping off cliffs, between big boulders, climbing them taking a rather steeper risky route, I am frequently stopped and asked this “aren’t you scared you’ll fall?”. As most people find it risky and simply irresponsible or even worse, declare I am a monkey who doesn't care if he'll die.
The truth is I am not a monkey(although I admire them a lot) and yes I do care about my life but it’s how I perceive what’s dangerous and what scares me that makes me and other monkeys like me different.
If you see, there’s a very fine line between being an utter idiot and being brave, being stupid, and being adventurous. It’s the decisions and thought process on that line that takes you on either side of the line.
I see fear and danger as a highly subjective thing, what might scare one person might not scare the other. Not everybody finds clowns scary, not everybody is afraid of talking to pretty girls, not everybody finds spiders dangerous. So that’s one of the straight forward answers to the question.
If I have to sound more intellectual, I’d rather ask myself- how do I decide if something is scary or dangerous? Calculating the risk is not for cowards, you don’t become cool just by doing anything without thinking, you just become lucky(if you don’t die of course).
The differential factor is how ready are you to push the limits, how curious are you to find out if you’re gonna make it to the other side or not and the most important part is, with all that in the back of your mind, taking a step.
More than from books I take inspirations from song lyrics(i know, weird) but when Chris martin said — “if you never try, you’ll never know.” I felt that. When you have to jump between two cliffs, you don’t know(and it’s not a universal truth) that you’ll fall in the gap. When you’re climbing a mountain it’s not certain that you’re going to slip and fall. Nothing is certain, so why are our fears and limitations?
My answer to the big question is- if I have to think that what are the two outcomes of making a jump, I am confident about making it, not about falling off. I know the risk all along and trust me I would not do it if I knew for sure I’ll fall but I don’t, so why not clear out the doubt. and make peace with it. If we are considering the outcomes of an event then why do we always commit to the negative one, when the likelihood of the positive outcome is the same.
So if I have to tell you in a cool, motivational way about how to answer this question to yourself it’ll be this- ”You don't know. So why not find out for real? Make experiences, not opinions.”
