In college I was an English Literature major. Much to my chagrin, this meant that I had to read a lot of so-called classics, written by what many Lit. majors dubbed “dead white men.” I don’t like being told what to do, so from the outset, college was a highly problematic challenge for my ego. And the hardest part about taking orders was forcing myself to read a book that I had no interest in reading. The book in college that I was assigned to read that I dreaded the most was “The Prelude” by William Wordsworth. I was very perturbed by this particular assignment because it was a lengthy poem, written by one of the most famous romantic period authors, and it was extremely long for a poem (did I already mention that?). I can remember dreading the act of reading this book as much as I dreaded waking up on the day after the Presidential election of 2004. For me, Wordsworth’s unread book represented hundreds of pages of boring, sappy poetry, and I was not a happy camper about this assignment.
But like so many other experiences in my life, reading “The Prelude,” an act that I initially dreaded, turned out to be a life altering experience, and an extreme pleasure to read. After I finished the book, I was shocked to realize that it ends up that some dead dude from the 18th Century and I actually have a lot in common. For “The Prelude” isn’t about some maiden that William pined over, nor is it a whining tale of unrequited love. Instead, it’s actually a well written, free verse autobiography, and moreover, it is a tribute to Nature (with a capital N!), and the sense of spirituality and oneness that we can each achieve simply by walking out into nature, alone, with welcoming, open arms.
This weekend, after living in Portland for nearly two years, I finally spent some time getting back into contact with nature. It seems that Portland is located only twenty minutes, by car, from the largest waterfall (based on the distance it drops) in North America. This area is known as Multnomah Falls. The hike to the top of the falls is a pleasant and easy one, and only about two and a half miles each way, but nonetheless, as I climbed the switchbacks with two of my friends, I encountered several of what I call “Wordsworth Moments.” Ever since I read “The Prelude” and studied it with one of my favorite professors, I have called any moment in my life wherein I connect with nature, and my mind achieves an empowering feeling of divinity a “Wordsworth Moment.”
Wordsworth Moments, for me, are the impetus of everything that I have ever created. Every fictional character and plot that I have devised, have come from a Wordsworth Moment. Every song that I’ve written came from a Wordsworth Moment. I guess what I’m getting at is that for me, nature is my only muse, and it is nature that enables me to create. And so sure enough, as I approached the summit of the trail, and found myself overlooking the intense vertical drop of the enormous waterfall, I breathed in deeply, looked out over the sharp cliffs of the mountain, and I begin to harmonize with nature. My first thought, as I entered the sublime was, “Oh my god, Mike, if you slip and fall, you are going to fall down a long way, and you will die.” My follow up to that thought was, “You see, Mike, this is why your friends ridicule you and your so-called irrational fears. It’s because you are a big baby, and can’t just relax and enjoy the moment.” So thanks to the psychotically self-induced peer pressure of my own paranoid mind, I decided to seize this splendidly sublime Wordsworth Moment, and have it out, once and for all, me versus my so-called irrational fears.
So what, I’m afraid of falling and dying from the fall. So what? I mean; I don’t really understand what is so irrational about that. I am confident that one of the major ingredients for success in life on Earth is learning to call a spade a spade, or seeing things for what they really are. So a fear is a fear, and I can acknowledge the fact that I may suffer from some pretty stupid fears. But I’m unclear about the boundary that divides a rational fear from an irrational one. I don’t understand how I’m not supposed to think about death when I stand on a pathetically built look out station on a mountaintop, over a tremendous waterfall. How am I not supposed to think about the horrifying prospect of losing the only thing I truly have in this world; namely, myself, my brain, my consciousness, my inner-monologue? I continued to explore this thought, when it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of falling off the mountainside at all. What I feared was not the way that I could die, but the thought of death itself. This explains why it is that I don’t get scared or nervous about flying, but nonetheless always mentally prepare myself for death each and every time I step foot on an airplane. As I began to revel in this epiphany of mine, I took a lot of comfort because what I achieved during this “Multnomah Falls Wordsworth Moment” was the realization that I am not afraid of how I die, my ultimate fear is a rational fear of the uncertainty of an afterlife.
So one day later, I’m spinning in a world of wonder, because suddenly I’m not afraid of the little things, like I used to be. I am suddenly not afraid of things like the noise of a vacuum cleaner, or ladders, or being incarcerated for a crime I did not commit. I’m even finding myself less wary of strangers, even the ones with candy. I’ve come to this conclusion because, the way I see it, there are about a million different ways that I could die, but now that I have unassociated death and dying, and realized the obvious, yet previously unrealized difference between the two, I’m finding out that I’m really only afraid of a boring, lousy afterlife. Because if this is really all I’ve got, then I’m not sure if I’m doing enough with my gifts to get the most out of life. What if, god forbid, Fredrick Nietzsche was right, and nihilism is indeed the true nature of our Universe? Like it or not, Nihilism, or the belief in nothing, has to be a possible ‘afterlife’. As much as I enjoy my daily meditations, and those awesome moments in life where I feel connected with the universe, to believe that nothing awaits me when I die is about as realistic to me as believing in a mystical place like heaven or hell—and it scares me like nothing else. I’m not writing this to argue for or against any of these three possible afterlife’s, but rather, I am postulating that there isn’t a whole lot of empirical evidence to truly win me over in any one direction, and this is what causes most of the hesitancy I experience about making decisions about what to do with my life. But I’ll save that tangent for another time, because I cannot even began to explore just how drastically my behavior would change were I to be convinced that Nihilism was the true essence of our Universe.
So how I die doesn’t really matter, it’s what happens after I die that matters. And lucky for me, this hike has somehow lifted the burden of fearing how I will die from my mind. And I’m very thankful, because I’m tired of toiling over the ridiculous myriad of possible endings to my own life. Yes, I’m tired of crossing a street, and thinking about how I could get hit by a bus, or hopping on my bike, and thinking about how I could fall off of my bike and split my head on the pavement, or how I could fall in the shower, or how I could inadvertently suffocate myself by twisting around in too many blankets at night, or the fact that I’m finally old enough to suffer death from a heart attack (I’m twenty-five, and some paranoia-induced WebMD research has taught me that many people younger than I am have died from cardiac arrest). I no longer even fear that I could have some horrible genetic disease that is about to take over my body and kill me, and about how no one on Earth could possibly cure me of this disease, since no one else has ever suffered from it because it is truly unique, and only possible given every single permutation of my genetic codes. I’m no longer going to lie awake at night, fearing that I will die from a disease with no name, and about how science will have to name this disease “Mike Oppenheim’s Disease” after I die from it, just like Lou Gehrig and his disease.
Fear is always there, if you invite it into your life. Even a tube of toothpaste, if you read it carefully, warns the user of the product of the various ways that toothpaste can poison you, and gives you instructions to follow in case of ‘accidental ingestion.’ Personally, I’ve never once brushed my teeth without ingesting a little bit of toothpaste, but if I were truly irrational, then I would be nervous about the physical injury that my body has already suffered from the cumulative effects of ingesting a tiny bit of this poison twice a day, nearly every day of my life. But I’m not, because if you live your life in fear, then you are living a pretty boring, constricted life, and you are going to constantly be turning away the spectacular splendors of life that only come about when you take a chance.
But just because I’m no longer afraid of how I may die, does not mean that I’m cured of my intolerance for the tiny things that rub me the wrong way. I am not, and will never be, because trying to get rid of the things that irk me is important if I want to really create the perfect world for me to exist in. So I am hereby ending my streak of writing about irrational fears, since it will get me nowhere in life, and I am instead wrapping up the month of January, the first month of 2008, with a short list of a few things that irk me.
I am always irked by the terrible noise that an Airplane toilet makes when it flushes. Why on Earth does it have to be so loud and fast, why can’t it just flush like a regular toilet, and empty its contents into a septic tank in the belly of the jet? The noise is so terrible that I’m often tempted not to flush the darn thing, and leave the task to the next visitor. Maybe some engineer can fill me in on why these toilets have to be so invasive.
I am constantly irked by the fact that Starbucks has brainwashed most Americans into thinking that their drinks are standard drinks to be found in any and all coffee shops. Just because Starbucks has fooled many people into thinking that a milkshake with a hint of coffee flavor counts as a cup of coffee does not mean that every other coffee shop should be expected to pump out similarly unhealthy, ridiculous “coffee” beverages. If you want coffee, then order coffee, and add a little cream or sugar, but if you want a milkshake, then don’t waste your money paying Starbucks for one, when McDonalds or Dairy Queen offers you the same product for about half the price. (And their lines are shorter, too.)
And finally, I’m irked most of all by Yuppies. I generally write my column in a coffee shop, so it’s safe to say that I’m like Dian Fossey, of “Gorillas in the Mist,” when it comes to witnessing the live Yuppie in their own habitat (You only have to replace the word Gorillas with Yuppies to catch my drift here.). And it may be cliché, at this point, to complain about Yuppies again, since I’m sure that I’m slowly turning into one, just like a tadpole can’t help but turn into a frog, but I’m irked as I write this, because the coffee shop that I’m in has just been taken over by about thirty Yuppies, and they are each talking loudly about how their New Year’s diets aren’t quite working out, as they eat 1,000 calorie blueberry muffins and sip on whole milk latte’s with chocolate syrup and caramel. I think dieters who talk about dieting while they eat fattening food is just downright pathetic, because even if their intentions are good, their follow through sucks, and it sucks a lot for me to have to lose my concentration from overhearing their obnoxiously loud hypocrisy. Of course, there is something that I do, that easily overshadows these Yuppies and their hypocrisy, which is to talk about how I’m trying to quit smoking as I smoke a cigarette with a fellow smoker. But I’m not interested in discussing my own problems or exposing my own hypocrisy, I am selfishly concerned with Yuppies, and how they irk me, so I’ll have to do the only thing that I can think to do in such a moment, which is to stop my rambling, and go outside to smoke a cigarette, alone, in the freezing cold, and pray for a Wordsworth Moment to help me quit smoking.