The big picture

In almost a year of pottering around with this blog and the concept of confronting my fears, I’ve discovered, to my delight, that the list of things I don’t dare risk is short indeed. Sure, there are things that make my pulse pound and my stomach flip. Heights. Spiders. Inexplicable rejection. Incurring someone else’s bad opinion. (That’s a tough one, that is. I have to remind myself daily that what other people think of me is none of my business.) But it turns out not much intimidates me so much that I literally can’t bring myself to do it.

Which is good. Because I’m beginning to realize that the things I really need to worry about are the things there’s no point worrying about. The ice in the Arctic is melting faster than even the worst-case scenarios had predicted, and the new worst-case scenarios now involve coping — figuring out which disasters to respond to, which hungry mouths to feed, which thirsty people to whom to provide safe water — rather than trying to keep the worst from happening.

Sigh.

Now that’s intimidating. And yet what can I do but accept it, do my tiny part, and hope it adds up?

Yes, I feel guilty about getting on a plane later this week to go halfway around the world. All that CO2 wasted for my whims! But I’m not going to cancel. The people whose artifacts I’ll be digging up could never have imagined what life would be like 1000, 1500, 2000 years in the future. They may not have imagined life would still exist; the medieval ones, at any rate, expected the end of the world to come a lot sooner. Standing in a ditch, digging up their ovens, their rubbish pits, their skeletons, and their … um … fossilized poop is a good way to remind myself that I have no idea what life will be like 1000, 1500, 2000 years from now. The world may all go pear-shaped in my lifetime, or in the next century. Then again, it might continue on in some way I can’t even begin to imagine. All I know is that by the time I’ve receded into history, the world will be as unimaginably different as our world would look to the Romans, the Saxons, or the Vikings.

Looked at that way, what, really, do I have to be afraid of?

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