Scenes of Bold and Rapturous Unconcern
Hello. Forgive the outrageously unsubtle hook: Have you ever, suddenly and for no apparent reason, found yourself feeling lighter, more confident, a little reckless? And if you have, did you also happen to look around?
A few weeks ago and shortly after my last race, I was having coffee with a friend, explaining how 100-milers—and ultramarathons in general—work. (She asked, I swear.) Her questions revolved mainly around the typical eyebrow raisers (hallucinations, projectile vomiting, that sort of thing), as well as the dubious reasoning behind attempting something like that in the first place. I knew she was just being polite, so I kept my answers short and entertaining (both or either).
When she asked about the terrain, I told her about the winding singletrack trails, the expansive, extravagant vistas, the serene forests. I watched her face for any sign that I should cool it with the adjectives or change the subject altogether, but she appeared genuinely interested. You know, in that attentive but not overly enthusiastic way of a friend who cares about you but not necessarily about your weird hobbies.
Then, as I was talking, something in her mind seemed to click, and she leaned forward as her studied politeness devolved into unguarded, childlike impatience. “Wait, you run in the woods? Alone. In the. Woods.”
The way she said it made it sound like she was proposing we go around them somehow; whereas I was of the opinion that running through a forest was mighty fun and in no way an acceptable reason to put periods in the middle of one’s sentence. Besides, next to crowd favorites such as wildflower meadows and pristine alpine lakes, a bunch of trees seemed an unusual thing on which to fixate. Yet it was easy to see that this was the part that resonated with her.
Forests made her uneasy, she told me, voice hushed, eyebrows a-furrow. It wasn’t any particular threat that spooked her but this vague, ominous feeling. To her mind, a forest was always dark, no matter the time of day; it was vast, yet claustrophobic; it was unnatural. Perhaps she was thinking of Tolkien’s Mordor.
Of course, I recognized the vague and ominous feeling. Any human would.
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Fear is our ancient, innate, universal response to danger. It’s faster than rational thought and wholly unsusceptible to it. It serves the big fat purpose of keeping us alive; fear is one of evolution’s big guns. It also requires, ahem, a trigger—a threat we can come at with our fight-flight-freeze thing. Fear will always be our brain’s immediate response to an imminent threat to our safety.
What about threats we envision might befall us sometime in the future, possibly, maybe? To those, our brain responds with things like anxiety, overthinking, and weaponization of our sweat glands. And it does so way before and regardless of whether the supposed threat materializes.
In ultrarunning, anxiety is often a given (as is sweatiness, but in a sport where pulling down your shorts when you pee is not a requirement, and mud on the trail is to be taken at face value despite that horse over there, sweat is largely a non-issue). Because of the distance, the terrain, and the sheer amount of time and effort required, there are more worries than people arriving at any one start line. Some may be small and silly—the worries—and some can be overwhelming. I’m often in awe of our instinct-defying ability to subdue, adapt to, or even channel our anxiety, and the many traits (innate and learned alike) we employ to do that.
This is not about that ability or those traits.
In my friend’s Dark Forest, the “threat” was nowhere, but at the same time was coming from everywhere. It was her surroundings as a whole, rather than individual objects, that triggered her survival instinct. One curious aspect of this type of trigger was that it allowed for—nay, invited—speculation about its opposite. If it were something like spiders or needles, it would’ve been hard to conceive of the existence of—not butterflies or cotton balls but—anti-spiders or anti-needles. But imagining an anti-Dark-Forest was, arguably, as easy as imagining a sunny meadow. So I wondered, if a place could trigger anxiety (and thus the fear response), could a place also take worries away?
Of course, you already know where you can find peace of mind: your favorite vacation spot, your local library, the sensory deprivation tank in your bathroom. These places and tank are examples of butterflies and cotton balls. For one thing, they give you the opportunity to forget your worries, but they cannot guarantee that you will. A Dark Forest has a 100 percent probability of giving you the heebie-jeebies; its true opposite must have an equally nonnegotiable effect.
But more importantly, those oases of ours are contrived. We, as a species, build them for ourselves. What the conversation with my friend made me wonder was, had I ever chanced upon one that wasn’t supposed to be, somewhere I wouldn’t have thought to look for it? Had some unseen, unsought, untapped place ever just made me forget my worries, suddenly and nonnegotiably and without my knowledge or permission—and certainly without my trying?
I keep calling these places “places,” but it’s too restrictive of a word. I prefer to think of them as scenes instead. It lends them just the right amount of abstractness and conveys complexity inaccessible to the more grounded but somewhat charmless “places.”
This, then, is an inquiry into the nature of these scenes and the forms they may take, as well as an attempt to illustrate how awareness with zero survival value can also be beneficial, if only in adding to our understanding of how our environment affects our mood and emotions. So if the thing missing from your life right now happens to be “more things I can’t control,” you’re welcome.
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I asked my friend what she thought was the opposite of the Dark Forest. It was her imaginary threat, after all. Her answer was predictable: “Open spaces, the beach…” I sipped my coffee. “Bookstores, art galleries…” Butterflies and cotton balls—she was just listing places she didn’t find frightening. I ditched her at the coffeehouse and deleted her number. Or actually, no, I think she did that to me, after I mentioned the words “dark forest” for the 17th time.
Not that I had anything against beachside art galleries, but I wasn’t interested in “passively unthreatening.” The places I was looking for actively exorcised anxiety from their visitor’s mind. They were kind of badass, those places. Except, I tried coming up with an example myself and… confounding variables galore. If I had ever come across such a place, I hadn’t come across it in a vacuum. How do I isolate the effect of something for which I didn’t know how it looked from the effects of literally everything else occurring at the time?
Perhaps squinting at the air in front of me while randomly poking around in my brain wasn’t the best way to approach this. But I didn’t know when I would happen upon one of those places (again?). For now, random brain-poking was all I got.
Or perhaps the reason it was so difficult to come up with an example was that I was imagining causality where there was at best correlation, at worst randomness. If so, there were no places that actively banished anxiety, the anti-Dark-Forest wasn’t real, and any cutesy essays supposing its existence would have to have this paragraph as their disappointing conclusion.
[emphatic carriage-return sound effect]
My curiosity-turned-fixation, it turned out, was fueled by real-world experiences I was just now starting to realize I’d had. No, I still didn’t know where the anti-Dark-Forest was or even what it looked like. But while I was trying to imagine it, I suddenly remembered how it felt. The feeling fluttered and then unfurled in all its visceral murkiness, tugging at my insides like those dream emotions that linger after we wake up, even though we can’t remember the dream. It was the feeling I’d sometimes get when I ran in the downpour, or decided to race a passing train, or in that oddly still moment when I put my hands on a sun-warmed boulder to pull myself over it.
Sometimes, if we tug back at the dream emotion, it will let us remember the dream. The nameless feeling was my anchor to the places I was looking for, the scenes of my worries’ disappearance.
Now then, for a lifetime supply of energy gels: How does one find where something disappears?
By finding where it was present in the first place. I needed to become properly worried about something, afraid even, so I could follow my anxiety until that telltale feeling told me I’d arrived. High-quality threats are hard to come by these days (that’s a debatable statement but let’s just say our neighborhood coffeehouse wasn’t exactly famous for the sabertooths sniffing around the pastry display). Fortunately, I only needed to find some perceived future threat, something to make me unduly nervous and sweaty for a while.
But even that turned out to be a difficult task. For all the havoc anxiety creates in our lives, all I could come up with were trite, trivial humanly worries. I needed something sturdier, more solid.
If my current worries were no good, perhaps I could try to find some recent ones that were at least somewhat compelling. As luck would have it, just days ago I had been through a hundred miles’ worth of things that could potentially harm me. I must have had the good sense to worry about one or two of them.
Correcting again for the trite and the trivial and also for what could be remedied by a cup of Coke at an aid station, my worries on this particular race day amounted to one. It stuck out like an eleven-hundred-foot sore thumb. Like an obscenely steep, talus-y pile of horribleness. Like an iced-over hump in the middle of mountain-nowhere that we had to descend in the dark, possibly in the rain and/or snow. It was only a half mile, but last year it had taken me a full hour and my soul to climb down it in one piece. I could not afford a single misstep, not unless I wanted to find out how does it feel to be on my own like a rolling stone, to put it Bob-Dylanly.
If this sounds exaggerated, it’s because it is, which is the whole point. There was some danger of falling, but in my head, I had blown it way out of proportion. Because that’s how anxiety works. As a result, I now had an excellent source of nervous sweatiness still fresh in my mind.
I began replaying the race in my head, frame by frame, coercing my memory to show me as much of my surroundings as possible. I followed my anxiety, chasing it chasing me up and down dizzying peaks, through labyrinthine valleys, along moraine ridges, all the way to that miserable pile of slippery rocks, all the while looking for the nameless feeling.
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It was funny how the journey through the mountain had had such a different meaning during the actual race, with a finish line to get to and time cutoffs to obey. I never would’ve guessed I’d be looking back in search of unseen places, so utterly indifferent to anything “race.”
Also valid is that I probably wouldn’t have thought to look for them were I not in the habit of undertaking such journeys in the first place. Ultrarunning gets at least partial credit for nearly all my over-caffeinated pursuits of abstract notions, this latest one being no exception.
I did find them, the scenes of my worries’ disappearance. Two that I could remember, although there might’ve been more. And they, well, they made sense. They weren’t some magical places infused with anxiety-neutralizing mojo. They might’ve been greater than the sum of their parts, but they were still made up of everyday things, perfectly perceivable parts of the physical world. And yet (or maybe because of that), I had completely missed them the first time around.
I find myself curiously reluctant to share them publicly, for all the five people who’ll read this to see (hi, mom). It’s a bit like sharing fears, I suppose. No matter. While I take a deep breath, please enjoy this Reading Recommendation in a Single Quotation with No Further Explanation:
“There is no cure for fear, nor should there be one. Fear is good. It protects us, gives body and character to existence, points us in the direction of what we value. We couldn’t make decisions or perform our best or even survive without it. Fear can be uncomfortable, sure, but this doesn’t prevent it from being an unconditionally positive force in our lives.”
—Taylor Clark, Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool
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The first scene was, and isn’t this amusing, in a forest.
It was early afternoon, the race had started several hours ago, and the runners were still fairly close together. We’d been leapfrogging one another, running alongside one another, exchanging encouragements, saying our why’s. And then the smell of pines and damp soil, and everybody was gone, and everything else was gone too. The mountain disappeared. The light snowfall wasn’t reaching me. The wind was a soft, sibilant rustle that no longer stung. The forest had blotted out the world. It was just me there, and I was smiling.
The second one had a ridge and a setting sun.
The wildest, most inaccessible, most inhospitable section of the course was the ridge that ran from an unnamed saddle between two peaks to the villainous talus slope of my nightmares. As I was climbing toward the saddle, in the shadow of the ridge, I could see the alpenglow warming the sky on the other side. The higher I climbed, the more of the sky was revealed, and the more intense the colors became. When I got to the top, in front of me was a pure display of power, the power to turn light into darkness. Standing there, with the fiery half-disc at my eye level, I could almost feel the terminator line passing through me like I was made of nothing. I was nothing. The sun was still setting when I got off the saddle. I was a runner again, and the wretched descent was just a few hours away.
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