At the Bottom of the World (Photo by Eugene Kaspersky)

For those of you who didn’t check in last week, we’re discussing Felicity Aston’s solo crossing of Antarctica.

To me, the bravest thing about Aston’s journey was her willingness to be on her own for so long.  The lack of connectivity with other humans must have been more frightening than the possibility of encountering hostile wildlife or getting frostbite, and much harder to prepare for.  A pistol helps discourage pesky wildlife, and some super high-tech longjohns and wicking socks help combat the cold.  (I’m not a survivalist, so substitute the specialized garment of your choice for my longjohns and socks.)

Nothing helps with the alone-ness.  How many of us get slightly panicky at the thought of being without our smart phones, Facebook links, or email for a day or two?  Never mind not seeing or talking to another human being for weeks on end.   (Your initial reaction might be, “Oh, heaven.  I don’t have to talk to the guy in the next cubicle or my snotty teenager for over a month,” but I think the reality of being so cut off might make even your teen’s sullen growls look appealing after a week.)

The fear such solitude engenders, for me, comes largely from the realization that I’d have hours upon hours to think.  Between writing, kids and hubby, household tasks, volunteering at the church, working out, reading, and other such activities, I can go weeks, maybe months, without really thinking.  Scary, but true.  When I try to meditate or have a quiet devotional time, my mind skitters to tasks left undone, projects in process . . . anything to avoid actually having to come to grips with who I am, what makes me happy, what my purpose is, how to better connect with the people in my life.  I can’t sit, being quiet, for more than a few minutes.  Imagine weeks of alone-ness and time to come face-to-face with yourself and tell me that doesn’t scare you more than the prospect of a hungry leopard seal leaping onto your ice floe.

And if that doesn’t terrify you, how does the possibility of a hugely public failure grab you?   I’ve been known to let fear of embarrassment keep me from talking to a woman whose name I should know but which I’ve forgotten.  The fear of embarrassing myself in front of one near-stranger seems silly compared with the prospect of millions of people knowing you tried and failed.  Wait a minute . . . maybe it’s the trying that earns respect, and the success or failure is secondary?  Aah!  Kudos to all who are willing to tackle almost unreachable goals with the whole world watching.

One of my big challenges in 2012 is forcing myself to be reflective without setting off on a solitary cross-Pacific jaunt in a canoe.  I’d love to hear how you quiet your minds and allow space in your lives for serious thinking.

Felicity Aston, alone. (Photo by Eugene Kaspersky.)

As most of us crumpled used wrapping paper into the trash, found batteries for the gadgets Santa left under the tree, and swept up glitter and pine needles, Felicity Aston slogged her way across Antarctica, becoming the first woman to make the trek solo.  Read about it here.

Let me start by admitting that I can’t even begin to comprehend what drives anyone to attempt this kind of feat.  What is appealing about weeks of frigid cold, hard labor, and alone-ness?  The motivation must be related to the urge that makes people tackle K2, swim from Florida to Cuba, and cross Canada on roller skates.  (I made that last one up, but someone’s probably done it.)  Leaving aside the personal courage and hardiness required to undertake these journeys, I’m always left wondering what was accomplished.  Not a single life was saved, nor human burden lessened.  Neither the environment nor the economy was improved.  So why do it?

It’d be easy to dismiss such feats as pointless, but I hope they’re not.  Since I haven’t interviewed anyone who’s undertaken such a project, I can only speculate, but I think there’s value in plumbing one’s depths, discovering that you can face down fears, keep going when the going gets tough, push through pain and frustration and physical/mental deprivation to achieve a goal.  I have to hope that these adventurers take that self-knowledge and go on to make a difference in the world, make a contribution, accomplish something that’s not quite so … individualistic and self-focused.

Or, maybe their feats serve as inspiration for others, give them the confidence to challenge themselves, try new things, set stretch goals.  Maybe the thinking goes, “If Aston can march across the Antarctic on her own, I can march across the street and confront the drug dealers wrecking my neighborhood/offer the homeless guy a meal/stop the teens from bullying the new kid.”  It’s probably a less conscious process than that, but who knows?

Since I’ve undoubtedly exhausted your attention span by discussing whether or not extreme adventuring has value, come back next week to find out what I think is scariest about Aston’s quest.

But then I took a make-up and maybe redeemed myself a little.

Here’s what happened:

I received a request from an on-line acquaintance I’ll call “Q” to blurb a novel. For those of you not in the writing fraternity, “blurbs” are those snippets from authors or reviewers on book covers saying “Best debut novel I’ve read since Thursday” or “This mystery combines the in-depth characterization of Agatha Christie with the humor of the Three Stooges.”

You know where this is headed . . . I read part of the book and knew I couldn’t in good conscience (irony here) recommend it. Problem was, in addition to being an author, Q is also a reviewer with some clout in my chosen field. So, not only did I not want to hurt Q’s feelings by pointing out the manuscript’s flaws, but I also didn’t want to piss off Q.

What did I, in my courageous way, do? I lied. I emailed Q and said I had too many commitments to have time to read and blurb the manuscript. Then I got to thinking about it. (Yes, I know it would have been more useful to do some thinking before sending the mendacious email.) The squirmy feeling in the pit of my stomach told me I’d done the wrong thing—duh. My lie might spare the author’s feelings, but it wouldn’t help Q become a better writer. And being worried about how Q would review my books in future was too weaselly for words.

So, I sent another email, admitting I’d lied and telling Q exactly why. I detailed the problems I had with the manuscript and offered to critique a future couple of chapters, if Q wanted me to. With great trepidation, I hit “send.”

Q’s reply was professional and gracious—not at all the snarls and scorn I deserved, and I’m happy to say we may become regular correspondents.

One thing I learned from this is that writing a blog about living courageously makes it somewhat easier to do the right thing (even if belatedly). I felt accountable. To myself, and to you. Studies have shown that dieters who let a support group know they’re trying to lose weight hesitate before eating that third helping at dinner, or snarfing down a handful of M&Ms, because they know they’ll have to confess to their friends (or the scale will do the confessing for them). I experienced a little of that feeling. So, thanks for your help.

With your help, maybe I’ll ace the next test the first time.

I paid for and downloaded a program called “Freedom” that disables Internet access for those folks (me!) lacking the self-discipline to stay away from web surfing or email when they’re supposed to be working.

The program is aptly named. I can’t tell you how free I felt when I told the program on Monday to disconnect me for four hours. I’d been getting inklings that email was holding me prisoner (yeah, yeah, I know I had to volunteer to let it hold me prisoner, so never mind that), but I hadn’t realized how trapped I felt until I got away from it. Knowing I couldn’t get to it, I didn’t even miss it. Much.

Working four hours straight, with no interruptions to peek at emails piling up in my inbox, I accomplished massive revisions on my third mall cop mystery, as yet untitled. (Well, I’ve got a working title, but I don’t like it.) I felt focused and creative.

I’ve used it every day since then and actually look forward to sitting down to write, knowing the writing is all I have to think about. I may sound facetious, but I’ve felt for several months as if I were drowning out my creative voice by letting in the din from Facebook, Twitter, email, and the like. Those things have their place, but I’m hugely relieved that I’ve found a way of creating a quiet space that lets me hear that still, small voice that wells up from my creative center.

How do you protect and encourage that voice within?

In a serendipitous adjunct to my new resolve to live courageously, I was pleased to be profiled in Money magazine‘s January/February 2012 issue, on newstands just now. Their investment make-over and my attitude make-over both have me feeling a little exposed.

And I’m embracing it.

The article itself begins this way:

Laura DiSilverio knows how to get to the bottom of things. She spent 20 years as an Air Force intelligence officer before retiring in 2004 to write mystery novels. Today Laura is flummoxed by the job of managing 11 investment accounts. She and her husband, Tom, are unsure whether they’re on track for him to retire in 15 years and help pay for college for their daughters, Lily, 14, and Ellen, 12. As Laura puts it,

“Spying was easier.”

See the clips below for the remainder of the article.

Talk About Ironic

I’m a novelist, so I dabble with irony on a weekly, if not daily, basis.   I like the sting at the end of a short mystery, the reversal in the middle of a thriller.  Think serial killer falling victim to a serial killer.  Or animal rights activist getting hemorrhagic fever from a flea on the bunny she freed from a lab.   You get the idea.

So, I found it painfully ironic that weeks after deciding to try a life experiment that I call The Year of Living Courageously, I was confronted with a situation requiring more courage, and a kind of courage, that I’m not sure I possess.  I embarked on this project planning to try and live more authentically, to speak up strongly when someone tells a racist joke in my hearing, to increase marital intimacy, to (maybe) face down my physical fears by riding a roller coaster more challenging than Disney’s Splash Mountain or jumping out of a perfectly functional airplane with a parachute strapped to my back.   I thought I might try a new activity just for the fun of it, without worrying about whether or not I have any aptitude for it.  (Tap dancing, anyone?)

And Then I Had a Colonoscopy

The doc found a strange, oozing lesion near my appendix and decided to investigate further.  A CT scan followed.  It showed a mass on my liver.  When the doctor called to break that news to me and suggested more tests, designed to find out if I had a form of metastasized cancer called carcinoid syndrome, my hands turned to ice cubes and I could barely write down the test details.  Endoscopy, blood work, octreotide scan.  The latter required five days of fasting—nothing but liquids, absolutely no proteins.  I burst into tears.

People talk about time slowing down in a moment of crisis, but I experienced the opposite.  Time sped up.  My mind raced through months of ugly treatments to my deathbed where my teenage daughters and husband wept.  I saw my well-attended funeral, my grief-stricken mother.  I started drafting mental letters to my girls, to be read as they reached life milestones.  What should I include?  First kiss, break-up with boyfriend or fight with best friend, graduation, choosing a career, buying a major appliance or even a house, marriage, sex, motherhood?  (Roughly in that order, I hoped.)

Let me skip over the gory details to the punch line:  after surgery that removed my appendix and part of my colon and small intestine, the docs discovered no cancer.  None.  The mass on my liver was apparently a shadow; there was nothing there.  I had a chronically infected appendix, now gone.  I would live.   Maybe, I thought, I should call my new project The Year of Living Gratefully.

I Ditched the Project

Actually, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that during the stressful month leading up to the surgery, and the weeks of recuperation afterwards, I didn’t work at living courageously.  In fact, I ditched the project completely after writing the first half of this essay.  My biggest battle was in my head, where I tried to stop anticipating the worst, tried to keep my brain from going round and round in non-productive, even damaging, circles.

Imagination, the lifeblood of a writer, is both a blessing and a curse.  I won’t bore you with a description of all the things I imagined before the surgery because you’d think I was neurotic at best and a total loon at worst.  Let’s just say my imaginings ran the gamut from envisioning myself, drained by cancer treatments, unable to write a sentence, to my daughters going off the deep end as teens with no mother to guide them.  Still, it taught me that to live with true courage, I’ll have to learn to exercise control over my thoughts.

And in the End, a New Start

In that knowledge, there is hope and a plan for action.  A meditation class might be a good start . . .

Several months later, I feel myself wanting to resurrect the idea, but now it feels more like a blog than a book. Sharing my experiences as they occur seems more exciting than writing essays in my little office, revising and editing them, sending them off to a publisher, and waiting fifteen months or so for them to see print. I want an exchange of opinions and ideas in real time. Thus, this blog.

So, what do I mean by a “year of living courageously”? It’s a work in progress, and therefore subject to change, but I want to live 2012 (and potentially every year after that) more bravely. As I creep up on (okay, race toward) the half-century mark, I want to do some navel gazing, open myself to new experiences, deepen my relationships, get out of my rut, make a difference in my community. All of that, in my opinion, takes courage of one kind or another.

I freely admit that we all define courage differently and that what is an act of courage for one person, might be something someone else would shrug off or do without a second thought. If you’re afraid of spiders, snaring one in a cup in your basement and liberating it outside instead of mushing it flat with the nearest shoe requires courage. If you quake at the thought of public speaking, talking about your job at your fifth grader’s career day is brave. You might throw yourself on a grenade if the occasion arose, but not be able to find the right moment to tell your significant other a hard truth about yourself. There’s physical courage, moral courage, emotional courage, intellectual courage. How tough was it for someone in Columbus’s day to declare: “The world isn’t flat”?

In the upcoming year, I hope to make a stab at all of the above. I’ll ’fess up to my failures, as well as invite you to share in what I see as progress or success. Additionally, I’ll highlight acts and declarations from others (in the news or that I observe) that I find courageous in one way or another.

I hope the idea intrigues some of you and that you’ll let me know about your courageous moments and how they affect you. Feel free to mention brave acts you observe or read about. I’m excited about living this year differently, and I hope you are, too. Welcome to 2012: the year of living courageously.

I’m currently reading Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos, which seems appropriate since Christmas is just around the corner. It’s a tale of loss and relationship, told in a vaguely Dickensian way with an omniscient narrator that I find fascinating. It is inspiring me to …

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