False Evidence About Reality

8 years ago I built a patio cover for my mom’s back deck with the help of another guy I worked with at the time. Over time, however, the wood has split and cracked, beaten by the summer sun and the wickedly cold winter nights in my hometown. For a year I’ve been telling my mom that I’m gonna jump up on a ladder and make it like new…but I haven’t. I could say that laziness gets the best of me, but it’s not laziness, it’s fear. Fear of what? Fear of doing a shitty job, or ruining the cover, or not putting enough coats of paint, or whatever. The more I live, the more I see that fear gets masked as so many things; sloth, apathy, attachment, settling, addictions, and routines. Fear. I fear so many things. I think we often think that we’re the only ones that fear, that we’re the only ones that are insecure, that everyone else has got it more or less together and we stand alone in our inadequacies. We do not.

8 years ago, while volunteering across the country, in a dilapidated house in the cramped Kentucky hills, a man named Jim taught me a simple acronym. We stood knee deep in dirt and trash that lay under the old flooring that we had just ripped out the day before. Now we needed to clear out these heaps so that we could set in the new floor the following day. Physically, clearing out the trash and dirt was the easiest part, but a small problem stood in my way (actually, a bunch of small problems stood in my way)—there were spiders crawling all about in the piles I had to move. When I was 9 years old, two weeks after my parents split up, my dad decided to take me to see a new movie that was guaranteed to cure my insignificant fear of spiders; the movie was called Arachnophobia. 15 minutes in, after the mother spider crept into the scientist’s sleeping bag and injected her poison into his thighs, causing him to convulse, I ran out of the theatre hyperventilating and terrified.
“False Evidence About Reality. That’s all it is Sergio. Ya just have to remember that, and you’ll be fine. They’re just gosh darn spiders, they ain’t goin’ ta kill ya,” Jim said in his mish mash California/Kentucky accent. Jim was 79 years old, and if he could do it… I slid gardening gloves over my hands, frozen by the bitter winter morning, and started digging ravenously. “Falseevidenceaboutreality! Falseevidenceaboutreality! Falseevidenceaboutreality!” I screamed out over and over, watching hairy brown arachnids flying from my hands into a new trash pile behind me. The day ended, I finished the job, and the next day the house had a new floor. None of those spiders bit me.

Two weeks ago I walked into a yoga studio a couple blocks away from where I live. I wanted to check out prices for classes. I got a couple brochures, and on my way out, I looked up and read a sticker that was posted on the wall. It read: “Everyday do something that scares you.”

I spent nine months traveling overland through East Africa and the Middle East by myself; I spent last summer hitchhiking across the U.S.; I went to school 3,000 miles away from all things familiar. These things sound frightening to a lot of people. Some of my old homeboys who have been in and out of gangs, who’ve had guns pulled on them, who’ve been to prison, tell me, “You’re crazy homie. I can’t believe that you did any of that shit.” I laugh. Those things never scared me all that much.

You know how many parties I’ve thrown in my life? One…kinda. You know how many times I’ve had friends over for a dinner I’ve cooked? Zero. You know how many dance classes I’ve taken? One. I want to do these things. I want to throw a party, I want to cook dinner for friends, I want to learn real dances, in fact, I’ve wanted to do these things for a long time, but the fact is that I haven’t done them. “Oh, laziness…procrastination…there are just so many other things that I want to do more,” blah, blah, blah, bullshit. I haven’t done those things because of fear. Because of stupid little insecurities that I let dominate me, and keep me from doing things that I would really like to do. FUCK THAT!!!

On Sunday I stood on a 15 foot cliff overlooking roaring white rapids and boulders. Four of my best friends and I spent the weekend white water rafting in the American river outside Sacramento. We had just finished our last major rapid, and the last adventurous thing to do was to jump off the cliff and into the rapids that if done correctly would safely carry you down the river. I jumped.

On Monday, sitting in my swim trunks at my cousin’s house looking out at the pool in his backyard, I decided that I wanted to do a flip off the diving board. I’ve been going to that house for nearly 17 years, and I’ve always wanted to do a flip. I tried a couple times, but I never fully committed and ended up just getting hurt and giving up. “It’s a stupid flip,” I always said to justify it. It may have been a stupid flip, but that doesn’t change the fact that I wanted to do it. On Monday, I walked straight out to the diving board, jumped off, and did the first flip of my life. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. I then proceeded to do five more, and figured since I was doing so dang good at that, I might as well do a back flip as well. I did a bunch. No broken bones, no major injuries.

For the first time in my life I cooked breakfast for a friend this morning. I made hash browns, an egg scramble, and pancakes. The hash browns and pancakes were a first. I burned the hash browns a little bit, and a couple of the pancakes burned slightly as well. Who cares?! I made my first breakfast for someone else, and it turned out that the food mattered very little. She just wanted to hang out with me.

A breakfast, a flip, a patio cover, roaring rapids…they’re just little things, stupid little things that don’t matter all that much, until you add them up, and you realize that you doing or not doing a flip, or you cooking breakfast or not cooking breakfast, are nothing in and of themselves, but you doing or not doing something because you are senselessly scared of it…well that is everything. The moment we let our insecurities drive us, we lose ourselves. You don’t have to do anything crazy, but I challenge you to try and do something that scares you every day. Not to prove something, but to do something that you want to do. The opportunities will arise, I promise.


Checklist for this week:

Fix mom’s patio cover
Plan my birthday party