“We are our choices.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Last week, up a ladder, almost to the top of the scaffolding, I found myself paralyzed by terror. The images of my own body tumbling down to the ground below weren’t constant, or even all that clear upon reception if I’m being frank, and yet there was something glaringly apparent about the whole situation.
This isn’t right for me, I gritted through my teeth.
This isn’t right for me, I say.
And so I knew, I suppose, before I let on, that I was destined to fail here. I mean, if fail is really the way you need to look at it. Yes, it’s true, I wasn’t going to do what I had told my boss, Mel, I would do. I wasn’t going to conquer what I had swore to myself I could conquer. There was soffit to be scraped and cleaned (a lot of it) on this lovely old home. Then a coat of paint was to be added. And the pay was good! And I’m not the sort of man who can afford to refuse good pay, now am I?
But here I was, at the moment of truth, faced with shimmying my big body off of the high ladder and up onto the narrow scaffolding. In order to do such a thing, I would have to limbo below a protruding down spout at the same time that I went from ladder to platform. Only then, after achieving my desired position, could I allow my breath to return and take in the vast distance between the yard way below my bones up in the sky.
I had just watched Mel (whose house this was) scurry up the ladder and proceed out onto the scaffolding with the carefree movements of a monkey who has spent his entire life in the treetops. And he is 70 years old! So why was I panicking? What part of me couldn’t muster up the same courage or machismo or whatever it is that allows a fellow to do a thing even when he is terribly frightened of it?
Listen, if I was to tell you, with utter humility, that I was afraid for my life, what springs to your mind? Do you chuckle at the prospect of the sight of it all? How much would you have given to be able to tune in (live stream!) to Serge Bielanko shitting his pants up a ladder at 9 in the morning on a Monday. What if I fell?! Would you want to see that!? Would you simultaneously feel bad for me but also be overcome with a sense of thrilling excitement as you watched my potato body (decked out in my woodland camo Army jacket) literally bounce on the patio stones?
Or would you simply grab your popcorn and settle in, an undecided voter on election night, tuning in to watch the chaos unfold?
None of these possibilities were lost on me.
The mind is a ridiculous weapon more often than not. To what extent might a runaway imagination like my own go to connect the dots from the calm of right now to imminent tragedy just ahead?
The short answer is this. That bastard will stop at nothing until I am stone cold dead.
The climb up the ladder to the second story of the scaffolding wasn’t bad. Everything seemed secure enough. But like any person who has ever found themselves ascending clanky rungs only to suddenly find themselves immersed in the surrealistic nightmare of watching the earth shift as they tipped slowly/ horrifically back towards solid ground: I, of course, told myself blatant lies. Of course I did! Plain as day, I convinced myself to do what I didn’t want to do in order to cross two necessary finish lines.
A) The line between making money and not making money.
and
B) The line between not looking and feeling like a spectacular namby-pamby and actually becoming the Uncontested Emporer of All Namby-Pambies everywhere.
People climb ladders and balance on boards far above the rock-hard ground all the time!, my brain screeched at me.
Every car ride is certain death when you think about it!
That’s what they all probably said to themselves though.
The ladder seems fine! Trust the process!
Then that final impact shucked their vertebrae like Happy Hour clams at some beer joint on the lagoon.
“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
— Helen Keller
The nature of fear is tricky. We are taught in therapy that fight-or-flight is a response as old as the sabre-toothed tigers that once tried to dine upon our distant relatives. Mankind, they say, learns early on that danger is to be recognized if tomorrow is to come round the bend. Yet, as humanity has progressed, I have this theory that we have gotten much better at bullshitting ourselves too. Maybe it’s a means to an end. Maybe it’s just Darwinism trying to sort out the goofballs from the cautious intelligentsia. Either way, you’d have a hard time convincing me that people who enjoy things like bungee jumping off of insanely high bridges or base jumping off of the tops of jagged towering cliffs aren’t somehow trying to show us that they are… how should I put this… missing certain ingredients?
Somewhere along the way people were faced with perhaps the first gray area in human history when they had to realize that there were undoubtedly some very real subplots to the whole fight-or-flight drama. On paper, it must have seemed simple to recognize that one person trying to live through a tiger attack had probably better haul ass. But maybe a group of us with clubs and spears and all… well, maybe we could stand our ground and come out on top. Either way, that first ancient humanoid who side-eyed a frightened runner set in motion a long and complicated debate in the annals of human history.
If you fled from what you scared you, were you a lily-livered coward?
There was power to be had in telling someone that they were a dreadful coward! And we both know that most people love power almost as much as they love fire, sex, and bad carbs. So it didn’t take long for this seemingly foolproof fight-or-flight scenario to be corrupted by mankind’s little penchant for being colossal dickheads to each other.
And once a few of the earliest Flintstones realized that they could fuck with other people’s minds for self gain, well, there was no stopping that train, hoss. Common sense and survival mode got all lathered up with emotional mayhem and the next thing you knew life had become a veritable orgy of psycho chatter. According to my completely unscientific ideas, good old word salad was born up out of legions of stone age bullshit artists manipulating good souls by making them feel like less than equals for everything from fleeing wild beasts on the rampage to not being willing (at first) to drag their women friends by the hair down to the crick to ‘skinny dip’ (i.e. rape). Allowing yourself the luxury of honoring the voice within you that tells you NOT to do something because it makes you uncomfortable and scared was quickly co-opted from a distinctly humanistic skill into an accusation that could both belittle and beseech a person into taking a knee to fresh hot power dynamics rising up from the dark horizon.
Alas, there comes a time when decisions must be made. And that time was now. After he had showed me what scrapers he had, Mel brought me some sand to carry up there into the clouds.
“Take this up with you and spread it on the planks.”
He paused. Then he nonchalantly added a last bit.
“They’re very slick, I noticed.”
Fuck me!
Slick?!
The planks are SLICK?!
That’s not the right word, is it?
That’s not an adjective I was expecting to hear. The two planks, side by side, offered a width of maybe 24 inches total to move around on. Normally a person wouldn’t flinch at the challenge of having two whole feet to shuffle their shoes on and not step out of bounds. However, once you’re up high you quickly understand the price you’ll pay if you’re even the tiniest bit off with your footing. So spicing things up with the word ‘slick’ made me queasy.
I stood on the ladder/ frozen in my fear.
Within me, entire libraries of my time on earth were burning up.
Shame had me now/ pinned down and helpless.
“I prefer to be alive, so I’m cautious about taking risks.”
— Werner Herzog
As it happens then, my entirely plausible scenario about courage verses cowardice wound it’s long and snaky path across a zillion years of so-called human progress only to find itself standing, last Monday morning, at the bottom of a rickety ladder. There, at the base of a wobbly scaffolding at the base of the proud Appalachian hill they call Mount Nittany at the base of a brilliant autumn blue sky positioned above far off Pennsylvania Land, the demon Shame raised it’s creaky old neck to feast its eyes upon what would become the latest in a long line of emotional suckers.
With it’s oversize scaly dragon hands, The Monster shook the ladder a bit as I quivered in my boots and fought hard against the evil demons coming at me from all sides.
It chuckled at the sight of me.
You’re a catastrophe, it hissed.
I bit my lip, driven to succeed at proving myself. It felt to me as if I wanted to do this more than anything I’ve ever done.
But it was all for naught.
I backed down the ladder and went to find Mel, to tell him I couldn’t do it.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
