On Fear and Nervous Tension.

I am not a scientist, or a psychologist for that matter. But as an arborist and production climber, I deal with fear and nervous tension on a momentary basis. I started thinking about this concept after watching August Hunicke's recent interview with the great Gerry Beranek, two phenomenal tree men in their own right. The question came up: What are you afraid of? And the interview slowly muted away from my attention as I drifted into deep contemplation on this matter: what am I afraid of?

Wow, I'm afraid of a lot of things: rigging wood over precious targets, working in dead or dangerous trees, securing my working anchor properly, cutting myself with a handsaw, cutting myself with a chainsaw, drilling perfect cable holes in the proper locations, stinging insects that may be present somewhere I can't see high in the canopy, getting dehydrated on a hot day, being late to a jobsite, forgetting a critical piece of climbing gear, taking a swing and missing big, throwing a limb out and missing the drop zone, putting a co-worker in a dangerous situation, and I can go on and on about the different aspects of my job that strike up a sense of fear somewhere deep inside me.

So now all of sudden I'm not feeling so damn rough and tough about being a tree guy, a high climber and a feller with pitch and sawdust running through my veins. I can find fear in just about every single aspect of my job. My anxiety, at this point, should give me an ulcer by the end of the week. My heart rate is skyrocketing, and I'm totally rethinking where my hard-earned liberal arts degree has landed me. You are the farthest thing from fearless plays over and over in my mind.

Oh no! What is it that I'm NOT afraid of?

And I think that's it, maybe that's just the point. It's not that we defeat fear or that we somehow ignore the fact that its there or that its presence is very real, that we can take it and ball it up and stuff it into the chute of the chipper and get rid of it forever and ever. But rather, we embrace it. This fear and nervous tension that we feel in many situations provides a sense of normalcy, and without that nervous tension in the air something would be totally wrong and foreign. Without the fear, things can go catastrophically wrong. Without fear, complacency ensues. We all know the cost of that.

In this sense fear may be our greatest tool, and yet we spend so much time trying to suppress the sense of fear that as climbing arborists we don't realize the importance that it plays on such a minute level.

We've all heard it before, "Oh in my younger days I was totally fearless!"

Yea, and that got you a bad back, fifteen surgeries, a beer gut and a vocabulary that's dirtier than a sailor fresh off the Mediterranean Sea. The only thing you're doing is telling stories about when you used to be fearless.

So I say, keep the fear close to you and embrace it. Clip it to your saddle and keep it with you always. To be able to climb high and prune fast is not something to be taken for granted. Not everyone is capable of it. Don't create some fancy illusion that fear isn't constantly creeping into your mind once you get up high and stakes are raised and the blocks are set. Analyze the situation and then analyze it again. Double check and then set the notch and then let it run. Use the fear like a hitch, fine tune it, make it yours.

Of course, I guess someday we'll all have beer guts and bad backs and talk about the days long ago when we used to fearless...