Going for the Ride

For a time when I was boy, my father loved to ride roller coasters. When he took my younger brother, my older sister, and I to an amusement park, he and my sister would always make a point to ride the biggest roller coaster the park had to offer. My own feelings about those rides was decidedly mixed. Staring up at the perilous heights to which the carts would creakily ascend made me glad I was still a few inches shorter than the painted boy on the board beside the ticket-taker. Riding one seemed more like a test of my nerve than chance for fun.

Though my father and sister seemed to be having fun when they went. I tried to keep track of them from the safety of the sticky, noisy, cigarette-and-cotton-candy-smelling pavement below, but all I could make out was my dad’s balding head beside my sister’s blond ponytail. The screams and squeals rising from the carts as they made their final, deathless plunge belonged to everyone on board. Then the ride would be over and there they were climbing down the wooden stairs side-by-side, flushed and smiling, happy survivors of that shared thrill.

Eventually, I was tall enough to ride one, and so, of course, I did. I had to. If you’re told you can’t do something until you’re old enough, how can you not do that thing once you are? It was okay. As I click, click, clicked my way up to that mechanical mountain’s summit, a part my mind thought, “This is where we die.” But then I didn’t. It happened every single time. I’d think I was going to die, and then I wouldn’t, and think I was going to die, and then I wouldn’t.

Years later, my father told me he did an experiment once during a roller coaster ride. He would use his powerful, logical brain to simply not be afraid. He knew rationally, empirically, there was no threat. So why be scared? With this firmly in mind, he took the ride and not once, not even for a moment, was he afraid. He also didn’t have any fun. He stopped riding them shortly after that.

I have since wondered how many of the threats I’ve feared in my life were like those roller coasters. In the stories we tell, the hero’s stakes must be high, and there is no higher stake than life and death. How easy to believe my own stakes must always be just as high, that the life that is success and the death that is failure give the ride all its meaning, rather than the joy that called me to it and rode beside me all along.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com