Fear itself

I used to think that after staring down the barrel of a loaded gun held by a crazy person wanting to kill you, there's not much left to fear. But the truth was, the whole surreal episode made me cling a little more desperately to life, to realize what I'd nearly given up, to weigh more dearly what still hung in the balance.

Sure, there wasn't much they could do to scare me into shape at OCS (Officer Candidate School) after that - yell all they wanted, I knew they couldn't (and had no desire to) kill me. But my career-planning, my life-living, became ever-so-much-more determined, steely-eyed not to forfeit what I'd almost never seen, iron-gripped on a future I swore I'd never again let out of my grasp.

It worked, brilliantly for my career, though to the inevitable detriment of most everything else. Four years of determination and sacrifice finally, astonishingly, paid off in an incredible career opportunity, my top pick, a real leap of faith from the detailers (what with my paper-thin resume), an open door into a limitless future. All blown to bits in just weeks with a cancer diagnosis that dominoed into cancelled orders within the hour. My XO at the time was quite taken aback that I cared more about losing my dream job than I did about dying.

But dying is final. What can be frightening about a fixed endpoint? Jobs are fluid, so many variables: they scare me in a way that facing death never could. Showing up in a new position, with new responsibilities and expectations, new boss, new crew, new unit...always worried that somehow I'll fail, I'll come up short, I'll let someone down. I don't like the learning process. I want to be expert upon arrival. I'm untrusting of my skills, talent, guts, intuition, and experience. Worried about first impressions. But I've been lucky; or perhaps my caution has simply served me well, because no job has ever been as bad as the worry preceding it. I study hard, I watch others, I listen, I step lightly at first, I trust and empower, I speak with confidence, I admit mistakes, I force patience upon myself, I'm eager to learn, and somehow...somehow it all comes out okay.

But Death is different: either you are or you aren't; there's no middle ground. And I guess I've always felt there's so little you can do to control Death (the wages of sin, after all, and have we not all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?), although I suppose that's not really true at all. I feel in some karmic way, I was supposed to be gone by now. Cancer should have done me in. It was my time, was it not? Somehow I cheated Death, for the time being at least, and though he'll come for me eventually, maybe I've carved out a few decades of "bonus round", of "overtime". It's finite. We like to think, us corruptible humans, that we live forever, but there's a horizon in my future and it's not limitless.

And in its strange way, these extra innings have made me even more fearless, if that's possible. Fearless in a different way, I suppose - prudent enough to plan for tomorrow, but improvident enough to enjoy today, to carpe diem, to go for broke. Unwilling to wait for company; unafraid to strike out alone. Hungry to seize at every opportunity, not just for career, but for family, for friends, for myself - to strike all that stuff off my list of things to do before I die. Fearless, because the fear comes from the waiting, the worrying, the unknown. Strike out and seize the moment and clammy fear will evaporate in the sweat of action.

For tomorrow we may die.