Counterphobia - Deliberately seeking out and exposing oneself to the situation one has fear for.

Lately, I’ve been investigating the ramifications of peak oil, and in the process I’ve been getting pretty anxious about the future, envisioning all of these post-apocalyptic scenarios. When I sat down and thought about it, I realized that for some reason I’ve always been attracted to extreme conditions in which survival is something to be kept only by relentless struggle.

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Traffic jams. A hundred cars trying to get off one freeway exit at once. A hundred people trying to leave a building through one small exit. These are situations in which following the idea of every-man-for-himself hurts everyone. The waves of tension and pressure end up slowing down the overall flow even if a few individuals get out faster.

On this fascinating website on the physics of traffic, the author asserts that one can actually approach traffic jams in a unique way: By going at a slightly slower than average speed, and thus allowing some space to open up, one can help snarled traffic to dissipate. Or, in his words:

A simple Traffic Rule: if everyone tried to make traffic better for the people behind them, then traffic conditions would improve for all of us.

Basically, the Golden Rule.

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I’d like to write today simply to express how much I love my wife Abigail, and how amazed I am that our relationship exists. I feel that I’ve come a long way. It was not too long ago that I pined for the sort of close relationship and affection that we have with each other, and it’s very gratifying to have that aspect of me fulfilled.

Our story is a pretty interesting one. I was living in the woods at Teaching Drum at the time, and she was in her junior year of college in New York. She says that she had dreamed about me before she had even seen the personals ads I’d placed on a couple of websites. She finally e-mailed me that November. We wrote a few letters back and forth, and when I took a break from primitive living to visit family for Christmas, we talked on the phone quite a bit. A week after I returned to camp, she flew out to stay with me for a week. I think that must have been frightening for her: She was going to stay for a week with a man she’d only talked to on the phone, in the middle of a frigid Wisconsin winter, with no running water or toilet. I’m glad she had the courage to come.

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I’ve been reading lately about the end of the oil age, or civilization as we know it. According to the website Life After the Oil Crash:

Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists, physicists, and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global “Peak Oil.”

Now, I only have a general grasp of the details, but it makes basic sense to me. We’ve seen tremendous growth in the past hundred years. We’re high, high on oil. We’re like the person who gets high on crank to stay awake for a week. The analogy to substance addiction is apt: Take oil away, and we’re severely crippled in caring for our basic needs.

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The past three years have seen me go from living primitively in Wisconsin to studying massage in New Mexico to preparing for acupuncture school. I’ve gone from single to happily married. All in all, a tremendous time of transitions, outwardly.

I’d venture to say that a lot more has gone on inwardly. Part of my difficulty in keeping up this blog is not that nothing is happening — it’s that so much is happening on an inner plane, and I haven’t developed the ability to communicate all of the details.

I remember that it was kind of like that at Teaching Drum. People would ask me what I did there, and when I thought about it, it would just be the basics: Get water, make fire, cook food, go to the bathroom. But making fire might mean spending an hour getting the bow drill to work just right, and going to the bathroom meant at least a half hour walk into the woods, and noticing the changes in my environment (maybe seeing some new tracks), and maybe gathering some firewood on the way back. All of which can be fascinating but also quite trivial, depending on who’s listening.

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