I just googled “what is moth dust made of” to be sure I wouldn’t be poisoning myself when I drink the red wine in my glass where a small moth just met his untimely death. The sheen of moth-dust still lingers in the iridescent cabernet and I feel like it won’t kill me. In case you were wondering, moth-dust is actually hundreds of tiny scales that aid the creatures in flight. Like pixie-dust, but less glitter.

Drinking moth-dust wine seems like the logical first step on my new journey to take more risks. Bigger risks. To give god(fate, destiny, etc) a chance to intervene in the slow devolution of my existence. It’s come to my attention that the lack of Big Scary things in my life has made all the Small Trivial things scary, because as humans, we need a fight, or a flight, or we become depressed and life loses all of its meaning. So we turn everything into something it’s not, just to FEEL alive. We call this anxiety and we treat it with drugs and therapists and alcohol and - as in, my newly-decided-upon course of action - risk taking. We don’t have to fight to stay alive anymore. We rarely get eaten by bears or die from dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Most of us even survived COVID-19. The zombies haven’t come yet, China hasn’t invaded, and other than egregious inflation which is denied by the hard left or whether WalMart will cancel Black Friday sales, we don’t have much to worry about.

So instead of, or maybe more accurately, WHILE I am waiting to understand the meaning of life and why I am still here, existing and consuming and taking up space, I’ve decided I need to do scarier things. Take bigger risks. Drive a little faster. Stay out a little later. Travel alone. Remain unemployed. Drink moth-dust. Go flying in small airplanes with questionable load-bearing capacity.

I went skydiving once and have long maintained that I saw no reason to ever go again, but maybe I am looking at it backwards. Do I have a good reason NOT to go again?

Ralph Waldo Emerson (who some of you know is one of my all-time favorites) once said that you should “always do what you are afraid to do.” This looks differently for everybody. Some of us are afraid of wrestling alligators but are not intimidated by the vastly more dangerous sport of raising children. Some of us are terrified of marriage or settling down but have no apprehensions screaming through the atmosphere in small metal projectiles with balls of fire propelling them. Fear, or fearlessness, are subjective. I’ve been called “brave” because I don’t have a “real” job. (I think it was actually a nice way of calling me stupid, but I’ll take it.) Truth be told, showing up in an office everyday is a 1000X more scary than not knowing how I will pay my mortgage next month. But money, or the lack thereof, has never scared me. Been there, done that, still have the t-shirt. What does scare me is being stuck - and yet for all of my attempts, I haven’t avoided it.

When I think about the scariest moments in my life, two spring to mind: once when I was on a roller coaster with Natalee when she was about 6, and I was so terrified for my own survival that I physically could not release my grip on the bar to grab on to her as her tiny frame slid upwards in the car towards certain death and decapitation (spoiler alert - she survived and just started Vet School and still likes roller coasters). The other was lying on a stiff plastic mattress in Uganda, surrounded by mosquito net with holes the size of baseballs littered across it. I wasn’t afraid of the mosquitoes or the subsequent malaria or the rebel armies that were still showing up from time to time in the north part of the country where I was. I was terrified that something might happen to one of my small children at home and I wouldn’t be able to get back to them. Both times it was loss of control that triggered my terror. My inability to change the circumstances. It was a good moment to learn something that would follow me throughout life - I am never in control. Whether I am sitting next to my child or on the other side of the planet - there are some things I will not be able to change.

A few seconds after I nearly blacked out while “assisting” (I was holding the video camera and light) with a goiter removal in a 140 degree operating room in rural Uganda

So why the fear? Why the anxiety? Because I don’t have monsters to fight? I don’t have challenges to take on? I read this great story in Outside the other day, and can’t get past these words from rafter Hendrik Koetzee before he met his untimely end in the jaws of a massive crocodile (sort of like the moth in my wine). “‘For me it’s not so much the bad times as the in-between times that are hard to stomach,’ he would later write to a friend, ‘when my life seems like a compromise not worth making.’.”

I don’t want my life to be a compromise on any level, and it has been too much of late. I don’t want in-between times, which is where I feel I am now, trapped on the other side of the wild and terrifying years of raising four ferocious girls and not yet launched into whatever fearful, mysterious unknown comes next. It’s the nothingness that suffocates me. Maybe that’s the monster I am wrestling now. Maybe I am facing my greatest fear every day - being out of control of what comes next. Maybe I should enjoy the ride.