FEAR CAN BE YOUR FRIEND

Risk can be intimidating, but the fear it engenders— if appropriately harnessed—can lead to great rewards.

It’s not my day. I can’t do it. I haven’t got it in me. These and similar thoughts of capitulation occasionally occur in my head when I’m faced with what, at the time, can seem like a task that is a ‘bridge too far’. Sometimes it’ll be a job such as sitting at my desk having to create a narrative that’s capable of engaging readers’ attention. Writing this column often starts like that. Sometimes in the beginning—a few moments ago being a case in point—I have no idea what I’ll write.

More often, however, this situation relates to the physical realm. It could be when I’m planning on going up something exciting and intimidating—such as a big hill or climbing pitch. Or when I’m on skis, psyching myself up to drop into a steep slope that looks icy and dicey. Or if I’m paddling, peering nervously from the low vantage of my boat over the smooth edge of the river flow as it drops down into the roaring white turbulence of a big rapid.

At my desk, the cause is usually laziness, which in turn dulls inspiration, but this is something I can usually punch through by pulling myself together. In the outdoors, however, it’s more complicated. In addition to laziness or a lack of gumption to commit, there’s also that pesky thing called risk. Of course, some risks are obvious and avoiding them is ingrained in us, if not by instinct, then by early experience. But there are many circumstances, especially in the outdoors, where the complexity of risk factors is vaguely known and accepted, and we rely on a ‘gut feeling’ to inform us if everything will be OK or not.

In my view, gut feeling or intuition is a sense synthesised from knowledge and experience (or lack of it!) mixed up with emotion. I’ve always known that it’s not a great idea just to push it aside, but I’ve also come to realise that the best way to evaluate it is to try to step outside myself, and to try to analyse the feeling objectively by quizzing myself. My questions run something like this: Do I want to do

this because it will be an amazing experience, rich with a suffering-induced perception of beauty and aliveness? Or is it mostly to be able to say to myself and others that I’ve done it? If it’s more due to the latter, that’s a definite red flag. The former, however, will ignite excitement, producing a positive and optimistic frame of mind which is a significant factor in achieving a safe outcome. This then leads to the questions of what, and how real, the risks are and how to best avoid them.

I can’t imagine being even a moderately successful operator in the outdoors without having an ability to push discomfort aside, but fear induced by a gut feeling deserves analysis, and it shouldn’t be merely shunted away. Outof-control fear may well be legitimate, but it’s unhelpful because it easily leads to nervousness, negativity and bad decisions, and is often the result of poor knowledge and planning, factors that most commonly will have led to the panicked situation in the first place! On the other hand, it’s my firm conviction that well-managed fear is your friend.

Awareness—and wariness—of potential risks because you know of their nature, causes and consequences are best absorbed through a gradual process of pushing your limits through practical experience. Most of us, on occasion, will have pushed ourselves beyond what might be reasonably called a gradual increment, and have experienced a gut feeling that we may be getting too close to the edge. Pulling back at this stage is sensible if confidence is lacking, but if we have cultivated a deep curiosity of a particular environment and the risks associated with what we’re doing there, fear can be the motivator for switching on our senses to a higher state of sensitivity. It can be a stimulant to more accurately recognise potential risks and ways of minimising them, and it can spark the imagination to run through potential pitfalls and how they’re best avoided. Successfully running this gamut of perceived risk, however, can offer great rewards. In fact, it can offer the most memorable gems of any adventure, not because we merely survive, but because in these moments, life sparkles with aliveness.