We Fear the One Thing That Makes Us Feel the Most Alive

How to befriend fear and embrace the unknown

A photo of the author on Socotra Island (an unknown place that I feared).

Jack and I filed through the woods in our bathing suits, barefooted and wide-eyed. The banks of the Ohio vanished from sight as we moved up the hill and deeper into the shadows of the forest. We were 8-year-old summer fish out of water. There was no path. But there was something back here; he knew it, and I knew it. We came to a clearing, and we saw the first car. Then another, and another. Then, beyond the first cluster of mangled metal, we came to a full auto graveyard — tucked away and rotting there on the forest floor. There must have been 30 cars, rusted out and waiting to be explored.

We couldn’t contain ourselves. We crawled in and out of every window, door, and trunk. I remember leaping into the hood of a hollowed-out car, making engine noises and giggling.

There were deep red stains on the seat of one car. On the windshield of another, there was a splintered indentation, the shape of a bowling ball — or human head. We karate-kicked wing mirrors and pounced on car hoods. We bent back hood ornaments until we heard funny creaking noises. Jack jumped up and down in a truck bed, laughing hysterically.

Then the stray cats came. They looked sick. One lunged at Jack, hissing and swiping at his bare ankle.

We could stay and fight or we could flee this paradise. We didn’t want to end up like those cars.

Would other kids come to kick around our bones?

Such is the cost of discovering the unknown. And so we fled, leaping across tires and long jumping over the collapsed carcasses of cars—cars that once zoomed from A to B. Did they see Alaska, Little Rock, or Miami? What unknowns had they discovered?

How did they end up here, in this clearing, somewhere in Northern Kentucky?

The cats trailed us for what seemed like hours. Somehow, we never lost our footing, as we sprinted through the thick brush, bloodying our little legs.

As kids, the great American junkyard was the ultimate unknown. The more we explored, the more mysterious it became.

But those cats scared the sh*t out of us. I’ll never forget sprinting down that hillside with my best friend, screaming and laughing, knowing that we had discovered — and lived — a great unknown.

The unknown is the source of our greatest fears. And funny enough, what we desire most is to feel the most alive — really and truly alive. We feel the most alive dancing in the forests of limitless possibility — deep in the valley of the shadow of the unknown.

Go where you feel most alive

There’s no hero’s journey that doesn’t involve the unknown. Can you imagine watching an “Indiana Jones” or “Star Wars” movie centered on familiar places and outcomes? What a carefully choreographed sh*t show that would be.

Our minds perceive the unknown as a distant darkness, ominous and full of monsters. Yet there’s always a light there to guide us. Just when we think we will drown in darkness, the moon illuminates the path deeper into the unknown. And along that dirt path, we become more resistant to the fear that once kept us on the well-paved road.