Being Aware of the Darkness, But Seeing the Light
Cindy and I hadn’t been camping in three years, but we finally had a chance to get away to one of our favorite campsites in southeastern Oklahoma over the Fourth of July weekend. Billy Creek is clean, underrated, and whenever we go, we usually have the place to ourselves (and the holiday weekend was no different).
When the sun goes down, sounds in the woods get louder. If you want to see how just how well the mind can keep you scared of the unknown, go camping. If you let it, camping can easily become an exercise in self-paralysis. The wind blows, a pine cone falls and lands with a crunch into a pile of leafs, and you look into the shadows of the trees. What was that? A raccoon? An armadillo? Wild turkey? A person?
Squirrel!
It’s amazing how creative we get when we’re scaring ourselves. We come up with all kinds of nightmare scenarios. Maybe that crunching sound is a some kind of mutant Sasquatch-alligator. Maybe it’s that thing from that Dean Koontz book Watchers. What if I’m looking right at but I just can’t see it? Maybe it’s looking right at me, watching me trying to look for it.
Every twig snapping, every leaf rustling, every odd-sounding animal noise puts you on alert. Sounds fun, right? You’re never going to be able to relax enough to enjoy the experience. But that’s how our minds work.
I think when you go camping, you tap into some primal fear-instinct that makes you hyper-aware of your surroundings to keep you safe. For our ancestors, this was life. Things would hunt you, and eat you. But that was then, and now we hang out in the woods and watch fire for fun. Yes, for fun!
But how can you have fun if your imagination is running wild, coming up with all kinds of nightmare scenarios? And if you’re a really creative person, the more likely you are to imagine, not just more scenarios, but elaborate scenarios of things that are out to get you.
When it comes to our own creative projects, many of us tend to do that very thing, that same thing we do while camping. We imagine everything that can go wrong because that primal part of us wants to keep us safe. It knows that there is something out there watching us, waiting for us to let our guard down, so it can pounce on us, criticize us, embarrass us, tear us down.
And just like all those sounds in the woods, all this bad stuff is mostly just in your head. We waste so much time on these imaginary disaster scenarios, which can keep us paralyzed, instead of using all of that creativity to conjure up good things for ourselves. When you think about it, it’s not really those sounds that make us afraid. It’s the silence afterwards, in which all manner of calamity seems possible and fully anticipated. What is going to happen next? we ask ourselves. And we answer by filling in that empty space with a myriad of trouble. I think most people do this. We spend so much time bracing ourselves for something bad to happen that we’re surprised when it doesn’t, and even more surprised when good things happen. We train ourselves to look for bad things, so of course we find more of them than good, and when we don’t find them, we imagine them. That doesn’t mean that you should put yourself in a bubble to avoid real dangers or real criticism that could be constructive. I mean, just because you heard crunching leafs at night, doesn’t mean if you imagine a unicorn stepping out of the darkness with a winning lottery ticket stuck on its horn, that that’ll happen. It could damn well be a rabid raccoon, you know. It might also be nothing.
We need to be conscious of letting our emotions and imagination get the better of us. On this last trip to Billy Creek, it occurred to me that all my years of camping have been exercises in trying to see things for what they are, and not worse than they are. Still, every once in a while, my ears perk up when I hear a rustle, crunch, or snap nearby, but I move past it much quicker now than I did when I first started camping because, one thing I’ve learned, is that it’s better to build the campfire up, feel its heat, and watch it glow than it is to spend half the night staring into the darkness, afraid of something that’s not there.
