I don’t like roller coasters, I don’t like heights and I don’t like scary movies. 

I love driving fast and going on road trips, I love the country, I love blasting music and I love moving to cities where I don’t know anyone and I don’t speak the language. 

Lately I’ve been thinking more about that. I find it so interesting to think about what other peoples fears and desires are. Maybe because I have long since tried to figure out why I love moving to a new city where I don’t know anyone or speak the language. It’s not like I’m in heaven when I first get there. I am usually totally overwhelmed and scared. I almost always call my mum on the phone every day for the first few weeks and I almost always end up in tears at the end of the call.

But once that initial fear stage starts to dissipate, I’m left with this amazing desire to explore and create. To wander and to wonder. There is nothing like that feeling. To pick up a map and have no real idea where you’re going to go that day. To have no idea who you are going to meet and what adventure lies around the corner. It’s a sense of wonderment that I can only imagine comes naturally when you’re a kid but somehow, as we get older, we become more afraid. We become more safe in our thinking, we have more responsibility, we have more riding on our decisions. 

Despite all of that, knowing full well that there is a baby joining us any day now, I can’t help but to want that. Maybe it’s the fact that when there’s change I’m better with a lot of change. Almost like I’m asking the universe to just pile on all the discomfort and weirdness and fear all at once so I can just dive right in. 

I’ll never forget the day I showed up in Paris to live there for the year. I navigated my way to the apartment I had rented, found the hidden key and went inside. After I dropped off my bags, I walked up to the local grocery store and bought some ground beef, some pasta, some fresh tomatoes and bottle of red wine. I made myself a big pasta dinner and drank the bottle of wine sitting with the windows open staring at the apartments, the surrounding streets and the many movements around me. It was one of the most awesome feelings.

I distinctly remember that they only had a few CDs, so I picked up the one on the top of the pile, Morcheeba’s Big Calm, and played it every morning when I woke up. It became this motivational anthem that would get me excited to plan for the day ahead. Music does that for me, it gives me this sense of emotion and purpose sometimes. There is nothing better to me than starting the day off with a great song. It has a way of giving you this boost that you need sometimes to turn a day from good to great, to turn an adventure that might be scary into something totally exciting.

When I was moving to Berlin a few years later, my brother gave me a CD before I got on the plane. It was filled with all his favourite songs and it became my album to that city. I bought a bike within my first few weeks of living there and as I was riding around, I would have this music blasting in my ears giving me this sense of confidence and determination to figure out whatever I needed to while I was there. 

It’s so easy to feel like we don’t deserve a certain type of happiness, a certain person or a certain place. It’s so easy to feel complacent with things just because we think we should or because we’re afraid of the alternative. When a desire runs deep there is something to say for why. Why do you keep coming back to it, or similarly, why do we continually not doing something because it scares us (in a good way). Fears and desires exist in us for a reason. I know I’m never going to love heights, or scary movies. I don’t feel the need to prove that I can stand on top of a tall building when I genuinely know I don’t want to. That isn’t the type of fear we need to let ourselves feel insecure about. 

I do however know that moving to a new city where I don’t know anyone or speak the language also scares me, but in this totally powerful way. It scares me in a good way. That’s the type of fear I want to harness. The kind when something excites you and scares you out all at the same time. The type that throws you out of your comfort zone, that you just can’t quit. 

For me, that is pretty much the only parallel I can make to how I feel about having a baby and starting on this wild new adventure. That there is desire and there is fear. Co-existing together, helping me to remember why I love that sense of adventure, that sense of curiosity and why I have this crazy desire to be surrounded by the unknown. 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us…Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you..It’s not just some of us. It’s in everyone, and, as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” [N.M]