“The future scares me. There’s so much unknown out there.” The words sounded juvenile once they left my tongue, but that realization did nothing to alleviate the anxiety within me. It was as if I was about to be lowered into a deep pit without the light to see the bottom or even the edges of the walls around me. Was there even a bottom? Was I simply suspended in the empty expanse of nothingness? It wasn’t the possible answers which terrified me, but rather the fact that there wasn’t any.
From the small opening above me, slowly shrinking as the distance between us grew, my friend attempted to encourage me. He was kind. Yet the fact remained that he was in a world in which the boundaries were known. He could see the ground upon which he walked, he could see the walls that defined how far he could travel, and he knew how high above him the ceiling reached.
I leaned back in my harness and looked up at him and, from this angle, it appeared as though he was no longer above me, but rather in front of me. “Great… now I can’t even tell which way is up.” I mumbled the words sarcastically, but the sudden realization of their truth only amplified my apprehension.
It’s a new kind of fear when you begin to wonder if you’ve lost more than just stable ground, but you’ve lost your mind. As the pale light of the opening continued to drift away, so did the confidence I had had in my senses. I couldn’t tell if I was in a room so vast that the sound could not reflect off the walls and back to me, or one so small that the sound was simply swallowed and done away with. Maybe my ears had quit working. I was, after all, feeling vertigo.
Typically in a large room, there would be air movement, would there not? Even my descent should cause some air movement or some sensation of it passing over me, but I felt nothing.
Yes, I was definitely losing my mind.
I inhaled sharply through my nose. I can’t really explain what nothing smells like. There are always smells around us, whether they are perfumes, plastics, snacks, cleaners, or just the general cornucopia of aromas which bombard us so overwhelming we that we take a whiff of the air and respond confused, “I don’t smell anything” . Yet this nothing is exactly what entered my nostrils. I sunk into the belts. That was disappointing.
Wait a minute…
I inhaled again. I can hear my nose! It was a faint whistle which I had hated when trying to sleep the night before, but now filled me with excitement. I smiled, “I’m not insane.”
At least not yet.
I could always count on my thought stream to offer me solace in a discouraging time like this.
A sudden snap jolted my back causing my hands to desperately cling to the rope and the hooks that fastened me. I heard his voice. It was faint but I could make out the words clearly. We had run out of line. I only had a moment to ponder a problem I had not accounted for. How deep was this hole that our rope would run out? His next shout was to ask what we should do next.
Let go.
I’m not a risk taker. I don’t like doing anything without the proper safety nets in place. I would never descend such a hole without proper assurances that I would be able to reach the bottom or, if not, have a way to get back out.
Let go.
The void beneath me was just as black as it ever was. There was no indication of depth or shape. Just nothing. And that unsettled me.
Let go.