‘Why are you so afraid to fall?’ She says to me, teetering on the edge of the bar, balancing precariously on the balls of her feet. I grasp around for an answer but I can’t think straight. My throat feels like sandpaper. I swallow as sliced slithers of saliva trickle down my gullet.
‘Because I could fail,’ I say, not wanting to believe it, but knowing that it’s true.
‘Isn’t that how you know you tried?’ She says, her eyes glinting at me dangerously as she bounces from the bar to the air, somersaulting with no end in sight, arms outstretched, toes pointed, landing with a soft plunge into the foam pit below. I steady the tremble in my chest, get onto the bar, lift myself up and take a deep breath.
‘Don’t think,’ she says, ‘just do.’
I remember saying it in my head over and over again, ‘Don’t think, just do, don’t think, just do, don’t think, just do, don’t think, just—’ the air swooshes against my skin as I fly upwards, time slows and I discover myself suspended in momentary eternity,—
Years later, I find myself clambering into a rusty taxi during the hectic rush hour of Delhi’s midnight traffic, wooden beads swinging left and right from the rear-view mirror, dancing to the drum of every bump in the road, and a taxi driver, not much older than I am now, humming with meditative rhythm as he drums his fingers on the steering wheel. I’m not sure how we came upon the subject, or why it stuck with me, but I remember, clear as day, that he turned to me as I sat in the backseat of his car, brake lights from the vehicle ahead making his eyes glow, as he said: “there are only two things in life, love and fear. Everything can be simplified to those two.”
I’ve thought about that a lot since I first heard it. Words which raised themselves above the frantic frenzy of New Delhi traffic, which permeated through osmosis into the plasticity of my restless mind. The more I consider everything in my life the more I can connect it to either fear or love.
Back in the gym—I’m falling, flipping over myself, dropping like a feather into the foam pit below.
‘You see’ she says, as I clamber over myself onto the dry land of firmer mats. ‘It was all in your head.’
And perhaps it is. Steadying the drum in my chest, a newfound relief drizzling over me, I observe the proud smile on the face of my companion. Wiser perhaps, I’m certain that the feeling I felt wasn’t exclusive to my sensitivity. She felt it too. Or at least, I know she had at some point.
I had seen her cry before, seen her heave and tremble, seen her eyes become cloudy, watched them fill like a well with tears, heavy drops that punctured her stoic face. I’d also seen her overcome it, seen her bite her lip and expel a fast breath out of her mouth before committing to a gymnastics skill that was both impressive and dangerous. She had felt what I felt, but she was smiling now, a conquerer to fear.
Before I ever defined the gnawing sensation that festered in the pit of my stomach, it existed only as an intangible feeling. I realised much later, those whispered words from the taxi driver ringing loud in my ears, that looking through life with love or fear is like wearing filtered spectacles, shaping every experience into a version of reality.
As a young gymnast, I remember facing fear on an almost daily basis. The fear was so strong that at times it would hurt my stomach, constrict my lungs, boil my nerves and cause me to cloak my feelings, to create a facade that obscured the heaviness of a life lived in fight or flight.
When I became a filmmaker, the pressure of making films was like a breeze compared to the intensity of competing and training. Fear, I discovered, didn’t appear as boldly in this world as it did in gymnastics. Instead, the fear was camouflaged, hidden, muddied behind paradigms of my own limitations.
Love and fear, I came to understand, is the paint that’s applied to the brush before it’s ever wetted and streaked across the canvas. It exists before the intention, it’s the framework of our mind.
“Our thoughts, feelings, processes and unconscious beliefs have an energy that’s hidden in the work. This unseen, unmeasured force gives the piece its magnetism. A completed project is only made up of our intention and our experiments around it.”
— Rick Rubin
Facing my fear is my recurrent creative purpose. It’s one of the most challenging parts of the creative act, yet ultimately where I attempt to transcend the innermost part of my being into the product itself. As humans, we’re conditioned to run away from pain, to avoid it at all costs— to skip instead towards the ease and glee of rapture, to the dizzying veneer of comfort, to the entrails of pleasure.
You, like me, might understand rationally that this is true. That we must face our fear. Yet doing it is another thing entirely. One can repeat, ‘Don’t think, just do,’ but to consider doing this, constricts our very ability to do so.
So where do we search for guidance, where do we find the strength to overcome ourselves?
German-Swiss poet, painter and writer Herman Hesse (responsible for one of my favourite books Siddhartha) considers the trees to be his ‘most penetrating preachers,’ he looks to nature to gain insight into the questions boiling within us.
“When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is.” — Herman Hesse.
Some fears appear larger and darker than others, but don’t be deceived, its shadow is long and deep only because of the low sun. Once we face our fear, that which so frightened us is never as big as it once appeared.
Perhaps we do not need to overcome every fear right away. Perhaps we must balance, like the man in the photograph, on the edge between both. Our power exists in walking the line between two forces, harmonious in the knowledge that both love and fear can spur on honesty that with time and diligence, can cascade into our chosen creative craft and elicit a new reaction within the viewer.
In the comments,
How do you distinguish between fear and love, and how do these emotions influence your decisions?
Can you share an experience where facing a fear led to personal growth or a deeper understanding of yourself?
Do you believe that fear and love are the primary forces present within the creative process, or are there other emotions you consider equally influential?
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-IL.
Amazing write up brother..
I love this. I find myself living by the don't think just do rule. However, it becomes so contradicting at times. How do you create, even yet, exist, if you live with the fear of feeling?
I keep coming back for an answer.
xx