My flight leaves tomorrow.

Nostalgia for home has been replaced with a general anxiety for the immediate future and so the next six months begin. I think any sort of extended trip like this causes a fair bit of worry for people because it involves leaving the safe little cocoons that wealth is able to purchase in America. We are safe, and safe feels good.

But I've also come up with a bit of a strange theory about what this anxiety means: all fear is ultimately a fear of death. Now, in order to illustrate exactly what I'm trying to say here I need to take you all through some admittedly strange thought processes. And in order to do that, I need to start where this thought did: with my fear of planes. I actually fly a reasonable bit, but somehow I still manage to need to take some deep breaths every time I takeoff. I don't care if cars are more dangerous (a 1/6,000 chance of death/10,000 miles driven) than planes (a 1/9.2 million chance of death/flight), there's just something damn unsettling about being hurled through the sky in an alluminum phallus. By the way, my stepbrother recently told me I had an obsession with statistics, but that's neither here nor there.

But even if cars are more dangerous, the real difference and the reason we (we being most reasonable people, screw the rest of you) fear planes more is because of their immediacy to death. In your car, death is an easier thing to distance yourself from because it doesn't pose a constant threat because of low speeds, stops, etc. In a plane on the other hand, you have a 36,000 foot memento mori every time you slide open your window. I suppose I can only really speak for myself here, but that memento and the fear that comes with it can be dimmed by some reading material and an inflight apple juice but it never really goes away.

Think about it-- that feeling you get on planes (or used to get before you Red Carpet Members conditioned yourself not to) is the original fear. I know for a lot of you this isn't necessarily a particularly revelatory thing, but for me it is. That is it-- all fear is a fear of death.

But the thing is that death itself is not a factor in our lives because when it comes we are not bothered by it (see: Epicurus). Thus, the only true way that death affects us is in how our fear of it affects how we live our lives. This is what we need to remind ourselves of any time we are afraid of anything. It's easy to say but hard to live by: the only true way that death affects us is in how our fear of it affects in our lives. THAT's IT. Death isn't real.

No, really, I mean it.

Don't doubt me now. I know when you read that sentence the first time you went right along with it. Actually, I'm not even saying you don't need to be afraid of death; what I am saying is that you need to act as though you don't fear death. It can never, ever, affect any decision you make. Then it becomes real and real is bad.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though I might be crossing my fingers during turbulence, I will be on that plane. I know, I'm a pussy-- but the plane is just an example; people get so crippled by fear they're unwilling to act. So the next time you decide not to do something, ask yourself if you're afraid. If the answer's yes, then you already know what you have to do.

Of course... this promotes a certain lifestyle. But you probably could have already guessed that.