Fearful Day

And he became frightened again. Buffered by the protection of the West the fear was quick to renew itself. He researched the far away place where the people and culture was altogether different, mostly unknown, and when he imagined going there he saw only the danger. He could not go there. He felt a reaction against it. He knew that if he traveled there he would die.

Yet he had just recently been in places of legitimate danger and had not once been scared to die. It was so easy to hide within the security of old habits, the institutions he had lived with for much of his life, and now returned to these institutions he felt convinced of the fearfulness that accompanies them.

But he remembered that when you accepted death and trusted it as an outcome, you found that death was always more distant than you had imagined it. When you no longer feared it, it went away. Though it might come for you, it would come for you when you willed it. Because when you did not fear it you did not look for it anymore. Death became a trusted outcome, a powerful confidence.

And when he remembered this he felt differently. The traveler must continue into the new territory. He will go to the Guajira to live among the Wayuu.