The Lion Tamer
A story about how to control your fears.
I wouldn't call myself a coward, but I do have fears. I think anyone who has hopes and dreams has fears. I used to take a sort of perverse pride in knowing my fears. It means I know myself, I thought. But really I think that pride came from the idea that if I knew my ideas I could control them.
The first fear I can remember having is the first one I remembered learning to control. Big cats. Lions, tigers, cheetahs; I was terrified of them. I had a recurring nightmare where it was pitch black. It was so dark that I couldn't even see my hand when I rubbed my eyes, but even so I could feel something out there in the black, circling me. It wasn't blind. It could see, and it was watching me. The sound of padding would come from somewhere behind me and I would start running, running so hard I couldn't hear anything except my own strangled gasps. And then, from the darkness that stalked me, came a roar.
I would close my eyes during the start of MGM films. I fast-forwarded through the bits of The Jungle Book that featured Shere Khan. I waited throughout The Chronicles of Narnia for Aslan to show his true colours, confident he was the real villain of the series.
One winter my parents took me to the Great Moscow Circus. The big top felt like something straight out of a movie, and from the moment the little round ringmaster toddled out into the centre of the middle of the stage I was enthralled. Then, about halfway through the show, a man carrying a whip walked out calmly into the middle of the ring. And padding silently behind him was a lion.
My parents later joked that I went white as a sheet. The bench we were sitting on probably still has scratch marks where I dug my nails in. I would have run straight out of the tent if I could have moved my legs.
"It's okay," my father said. "He's a lion tamer."
At first the lion just walked around the ring a few times, circling the man. I covered my eyes with my hands, peeking through the gaps in my fingers, ready to cinch them shut the moment the lion attacked. But he never did. Instead, the man threw a big pink oversized ball of yarn to the lion. And just like that, I wasn't watching a vicious man-eating lion, but just a cat playing with a toy.
The show went on for a while longer, through trapeze acts and horse-riding acrobatics, but when I walked out of the tent I was still thinking about the lion tamer. Over the following days and weeks it was pushed into the background of my mind, but it persevered. It became fundamental to how I understood fear. All you had to do to control fear was to tame it. And when I encountered my next fear, the lion tamer came to the forefront of my mind.
We were at a relative's farm out west. My cousins and I had spent a long hot day swimming in the river and exploring the bushland, and at night we stayed up telling ghost stories. Joel, the eldest, delivered the coup de grâce. Scary stories were all well and good, he claimed, but he had something better. A real ghost. Years ago, a murderer had escaped prison and had hidden in their old barn. When the police finally caught up to him, the murderer shot himself in the head. Now his spirit haunted the barn, attacking anyone who dared enter after dark.
There were immediate protests after his story, even from his own siblings. But he insisted he was telling the truth, and dared us to enter the barn if we were so sure he was lying. Being the out of town cousin, I was naturally selected as the investigator. We crept out of the house and made our way to the barn, and while my cousins all took refuge from a safe distance I entered.
At first it was almost as pitch black as my nightmare. There was no moon that night, and my flashlight was near useless. As I stepped through the entrance, the beam of light came to rest on two yellow orbs in the rafters at the far end. I was nervous, but not terrified, and the orbs just confused me. I walked toward them, trying to figure out what they were while my free hand groped for obstacles in front of me. I stumbled, and when I looked up the orbs were streaking straight toward me. Apparently my scream could be heard all the way from the house.
It was, of course, just an owl. Joel had known it would swoop anyone who entered at night, and invented the ghost story to lure us over there. The next morning my aunt had him mopping the floors as punishment, while my uncle took me back to show me where it slept. Looking at the sleeping owl, I thought of the lion tamer.
If we could catch the owl, I reasoned, we could put it in a birdcage. We would feed it and clip its wings, and eventually we would tame it so it was little more than a big lorikeet. Relieved, I told my uncle about this idea. He had just laughed and explained to me why we couldn't tame the owl. But I wasn't listening, because it didn't matter. I didn't need to actually catch the owl and put it in the cage, I just needed to know that it could be done. That was enough to control the fear.
I'd been considering moving to the city for a while. I was living in the same town I'd be born and raised in, and I'd never lived anywhere else. I had almost moved once, looking for work, but at the last minute I had found a job in town. The pay was poor, but it was good enough to get by and I was doing something I enjoyed. Even so, it felt like something of a false start, and I was glad I hadn't told too many people I was thinking about moving. I was relieved — I didn't want to move away. I had grown up here, my family was here, I had friends going back to school days here. For all its flaws, this town was home. In a new city, I would be alone. And that was one of my biggest fears.
It was more than just the standard nervousness that I assume anyone moving to a new city must feel, though of course that was part of it. That feeling of being some place new and unfamiliar, some place with no support network, no one to call at 3AM when you find yourself drunk, lost, and penniless. And sure, you would probably get home safely — at worst you could go to the nearest police station and hitch a ride home. But then what? You get back to your apartment and sit in the dark and you think, man, if I were back home the guys would give me so much shit for going to the police station to find my way home. But you're not home, so instead you just lie in bed and wait until you have to get ready for work the next morning.
But that fear was a small thing. Greater than the fear of being alone in a new place was the fear of staying alone in a not-so-new place. I didn't make friends easily or often, and I wasn't the most social person. If I had to choose between going out and meeting new people or laying on the couch watching shitty Steven Segal movies, Under Siege would win every time. In a group of strangers, I was best at standing quietly to one side, husbanding my courage to make awkward small talk, and wondering how long until it was polite to go home. Sure, in a new city I would undoubtedly get to know people. Colleagues, acquaintances, people who you might invite out for a drink every now and again. They just wouldn't be the sort of people you could call at 3AM.
So I stayed where I was, and I was grateful.
Two years later, I got my second chance to move. I was in the same job doing the same work for not much better than the same pay. Those of my friends who hadn't moved away themselves were settling down and dropping off the radar. The town had grown smaller, and everything began to seem depressingly familiar. Everything that I had wanted to stay the same had changed, and everything I wanted to change had stayed the same. For the first time, I wanted to move away.
I told everyone this time. "It's for work. The city just pays better". And that was true. Job prospects were certainly much better in the city. But there was another reason, one I didn't tell anyone but kept locked away. I wanted to be a writer. They say, if you want to be a writer, write. And that is true. But how much easier it would be, I thought, how much better I could write, how much more I could see and learn and experience if I was in the city?
So it was Bright Light Syndrome, perhaps. It felt like a dirty secret, something embarrassing you weren't supposed to tell people. But I kept it to myself and saved up for the move.
That was years ago now. I think I would have liked the city. But when you're offered a big pay rise to stay put, well, you'd be silly not to take it, wouldn't you?
I guess ultimately anyone can control their fears. You can lock the lion in a cage, dominate it, keep it at your mercy. And you could bring it out every now and then to throw a big yarn ball at it and tell yourself, look! It's just a cat after all. But that's not what a lion is. That is taking away from the lion everything that makes him fearsome, and turning him into something less. You could control any fear the same way. Fear is just a fire; to extinguish it, all you need to do is deprive it of fuel.
So you want to be a writer and tell your stories? Well, maybe you're just not that good of a writer. Don't waste your time — do something to pay the bills.
So you want to travel and see the world? Well, you've been overseas once already. Don't waste your money — start looking at a house.
So you want to move to a new city and meet new people? Well, maybe you won't make it, and you're not that good at meeting people anyway. Don't waste your energy — you already have a life here.
My greatest fear now isn't lions or owls or living alone. My greatest fear is living life as I have lived it; controlling my fears and staying at home. My greatest fear is that I tame my lions.