Be careful of the snake in your bed, the spider in your mind, and the scorpion with the sting in its tail.
Fear is a powerful thing and I remember when I first learned that fear can actually, be manipulated. And it was a long time ago that I let fear rule my life.
So let me tell you how it happened...
Wind the clock back. It was1972 and I had inherited a small legacy, sufficient to buy a block of land or?
A 50cc motorbike and a trip to Australia.
After a great deal of deliberation, ( Not really! ) I decided on the latter.
Prior to my departure from New Zealand, I had been working in a hotel as a receptionist and many of our staff were young Australians doing a working holiday.
I was so excited - off across the TASMAN SEA!
The young Australians learned of my forthcoming trip. They approached me, prior to my departure, with important safety tips:
" When you get to the hotel in Sydney, don't worry about the snake.
Every hotel room in Australia has a snake in the room to eat the funnel web spiders ... "
And
" if you see a kangaroo, make sure you stay well away - they can be almost as vicious as a koala bear.. "
And I believed every single word.
By the time I arrived in Australia, I truly believed that I was traveling to ( literally ) an urban jungle where rampaging roos and cannibalistic koalas lived in every hotel room in Australia.
That is, assuming that the snakes and funnel-web spiders hadn't gotten there first.
Needless to say, I stripped my bed every night and thanked God that I had survived another night.
My mind often went to the block of land I had seen - in the New Zealand bush - where the most ferocious thing was a possum or a glow-worm. New Zealand does not have snakes and there is only one poisonous spider called the katipo and it lives in an isolated areas of sand dunes and is very anti-social.
We finally left the horrors of Sydney and my parents and I traveled to the safety of Newcastle and the Hunter Valley where my Aunt and Uncle Bob lived.
I felt as if I had survived a Jumanji movie ( only it had not been filmed or imagined back then... but you get the idea ) and I settled back down to a thing called normality and commonsense.
And that was when I met my Uncle Bob.
He was a chain-smoking whisky-loving man. Uncle Bob was larger than life.
He was politically opinionated And he was a good man, a funny man, an intelligent man, and a man that I soon loved and respected.
He was a big man. Tall. Large. Really bigger than any man I have ever met. Not just in stature but in personality.
And I fell in awe.
He was so exciting and clever. He made me laugh. He made me THINK. He made me ENJOY myself.
He told me that my friends had " had a lend of me " and I had been "set up. "
And he said " The problem is that people today believe anything that they are told because they a too frightened not to believe it. "
Over the next few weeks, he introduced me to the cheese and pineapple burger, the chocolate malted milkshake and the delights of the pub counter meal back in the 70's.
I learned about the magnificence of the steam powered engine;and the wonder of political debate.
There was not a mention of a snake, a spider or anything that could frighten me, I started to look at Australia in a different way: I started having fun. I stopped being afraid.
Years later, at a wedding reception, in 1984, we were out in the drinking and smoking area of the outcasts at a teetotal non smoking wedding.
Uncle Bob , whisky in hand and cigarette in the other announced that he believed that the power of the masses could overwhelm the power of common sense and responsibility and it would be done through fear.
I listened and thought to myself: he's wrong. No way could common sense be overridden by fear! I had forgotten about the snakes and the spiders in Sydney all those years before.
He went on to say
" The world can only fall when the masses agree to their own destruction."
Years later, Uncle Bob abandoned tobacco and alcohol to conform to what people said would be best for him and his health. About 10 years later he was to die a sad death in a nursing home far away from where I lived. I once asked him, about 2 years before he passed, did he feel better for having giving up his vices.
He replied
" I feel better physically, yes. But do I feel better? That is a different story. I don't feel like me. I am no longer me. But physically? Yes, much better. "
When he died, he was a small man in a small body that no longer matched the magnitude of his big and generous heart.
He lost his sense of self. He WAS a big drinking, big smoking, big eating man. He gave up all the things he loved. His tobacco, his booze, his calorie-laden burgers and his love of life.
The last conversation I had with him, and we both knew he was on the way out, he said to me " I am in a wheelchair. I am in a bed made for old people. I am told it is because I drank, smoked and ate all the wrong food. I felt frightened so I gave it all up. And you know what? I have never been more miserable in all my life. "
Uncle Bob stopped laughing. He stopped holding court and he stopped being the man I knew.
Fiercely Conservative in his Politics and fiercely anti abortion, he never wavered from his viewpoint. That life was sacrosanct; technology was bound only to the limits of human intelligence and the money available to fund it; that Politics was as good as the People who believed in it and the future of Australia came down to happiness.
Uncle Bob used to say that Australians are happy people. When they're not happy, Australia is in trouble.
I asked him, all those years ago, " well, what makes Australians happy? ".
And he said "Australians are happy when they are allowed to be Australians:"
Americans are happy when they are allowed to be Americans. New Zealanders are happy when they can be Kiwis.
All countries are the same.
It is time to stop fear ruling our lives and get the snakes and spiders out of our heads.
