The Big Daddy Fear I'm Keeping

July 20, 2024

Fears. We all have them. And we’d sure like to banish them, eh?

Our culture supports derring-do. We thrive on it. We make documentaries about people who face their fears. Open any news feed and you’ll inevitably find 9 Surefire Ways to Conquer Your Fears. And FDR himself told us: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Because fear is the enemy. We must DEFEAT fear.

Or must we?

Last month I wrote about how I stopped most of my fears from hounding me. And I was privileged enough to connect with so many fellow humans about their own fears of water, heights, upcoming construction projects, and tons of nameless others buried under the couch cushions.

But I there's one I still struggle with. My own Big Daddy fear. The fear to eclipse all others. One that won’t leave me alone however many times I invite it over for coffee. This one doesn’t just go bump in the night, it trails me like a shadow through each day as I eat yogurt, de-tangle my hair, and procrastinate my daily run. I am desperate to get rid of it.

But also, not.

Because this fear belongs. This fear is my friend.

It may be worth taking a wee step back—say 30,000 years—to ask why we have fears in the first place. Imagine a super positive, optimistic and courageous cave woman who’d vanquished all her fears:

Ooh. I want to pet that cute little saber toothed tiger.

So, yeah. Not all bad. Fear exists for a reason. That reason is survival. Survival is a good thing. Ergo: conquering all fear ain’t the best idea.

Granted, modern life makes for heaps of low-stakes fear situations, and losing sleep over mismatched fabrics isn’t quite at the saber-toothed level. But still, that fear had a useful message to deliver, and listening to it helped me mitigate what I could control, accept what I couldn’t, and then I could let it go play happily with its peers.

But my Big Daddy fear I’m keeping closer, because it continues to whisper important warnings in my ear.

And what is that fear, you ask?

Perhaps you’ll forgive me for starting with the why.

Colin and I have done this dream boat thing once before. Back in 2018, we sold all our furniture, rented out the house, and took a Pacific Seacraft 37 from San Francisco to Mexico. We had amazing adventures. We loved our sailing lifestyle enough to double down on doing it again.

We also had bad weather, seasickness, engine trouble, sharks, orcas, broken gear, exhausting maintenance, dodgy anchorages, a pandemic to navigate in a foreign country, and a grueling bash home from Baja.

None of that was the hard part.

The most challenging piece of that whole multi-year experience was starting it.

I don’t mean the to-do lists longer than the Prime Meridian, but the emotional toll. Leaving our comfy bed. Breaking free of our familiar routines. Saying goodbye to family and friends. Choosing to head into the unknown.

It takes a million pounds of rocket fuel for a Space X rocket to overcome the pull of gravity and reach orbit.

That’s how much energy it felt like it took us to achieve escape velocity from land life. To even get to the place where we could cast off the dock lines.

And now we have to do it all over.

We have a very comfy bed—again. Familiar routines. Proximity to family and friends. But this the time, we’ll be seven years older. Our bodies are stiffer, our brains less plastic, our inner badass dials set far less than eleven. Meanwhile, we’re still in emotional recovery mode from the Pandemic-War-Climate doom trifecta.

So now my Big Daddy Fear may make a bit more sense to you. It is this:

What if we fail to achieve escape velocity?

There’s no going back to our old selves. We left the jobs, sold the house, signed the boat contract. Blast off is etched in our calendars—and our psyches—for November 2025.

Do we have a million pounds of rocket fuel left in us?

I need my Big Daddy fear right now.

It motivates me to push harder. I leverage it for resilience. It inspires me to sweep the ground ahead for any potential landmines I can diffuse in advance.

And here’s why I’m sharing it with you. Because the hardest part of our sailing adventure to come is RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

Honestly, I was sorely tempted to follow my M.O. from our last departure—wait until we’d already left and then say ‘Hurray! We did it!’

I’m as human as anyone. I want you to like me. Every instinct tells me to wait until I can take the vanity photo on a good hair day in our first anchorage to tell you we’ve reached our goal. (Yay, us.)

But what would that give you? Not a chance to see that trying to start a big goal is messy and scary and unknown. That it doesn’t look heroic on film, or obvious except in retrospect. It wouldn’t give you a peek behind the curtain at the nauseating uncertainty that—beyond a cute anecdote—never makes the highlight reel.

But that grubby prep is the million pounds of rocket fuel.

It’s exactly the stuff that matters.

So with 15 months to go till blast off (I hope!), let me be the first to invite you aboard the journey before the journey. The place where we’ll either achieve escape velocity or crash and burn. A place where some fears are most definitely friends, not foes.

Fair winds,

Cheyenne

P.S. In fairness to FDR, his full quote from 1933 references the Great Depression and includes far more useful nuance, which is often lopped off:

“This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”