My friend Kirsten quit her corporate job a couple months ago and started work on an organic farm. She loves it. She finds chicken eggs in the beet patch since they’re all free range, and the other day heard her coworker call out “It’s Easter every day on the farm!” On this side, it sounds like an absolute delight. A dream. A Hallmark movie. But when she told me, she qualified it by saying “This is my year of doing things that scare me.”

A quirky little organic farm sounded anything but scary to me. But I recognized this sentiment, because it is also my year of doing things that scare me. And I chose the not-so-terrifying land of Scotland.

In March, I packed myself two weeks early for the trip. The bookbinding teacher who got me addicted to the craft was holding one of her last retreats on the Isle of Iona in the Hebrides, and five years of dreaming about it finally came to a head when I saw the announcement back in November. It was as if I didn’t have a choice. I thought I would barf when I hit the payment button– not because of yet another credit card charge, but because I don’t do this kind of thing. My life is adventurous in a cyclical, tame sort of way. I travel with my family in a little camper from coast to coast. While I see new places every year, it’s rarely outside the country, and never by plane. And never alone. In the preceding months, I looked at maps, had nightmares of plane crashes, watched the news on actual increasing plane crashes, bought luggage, and generally kept the trip quiet. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it felt like something was finally mine. Maybe I didn’t want the obligation to post on social media. Maybe I don’t always need an explanation for everything. Or maybe I was heading right toward something I felt fearful of. Alone. If I failed– whatever that means– I didn’t want anyone to know.

The truth of it is this, that I am almost 40 years old, and I am feeling the stiffness of my joints to want to always take the same walk every day. I feel the craving on my tongue for the same favorite food. I feel myself losing my grip on the newness a day brings, and instead seek the most comfortable way through it. I have begun lumping people together, attaching their experiences and stories to a prototype I’ve met before. I am looking at the short line from 40 til death, and I am afraid that I will become increasingly afraid, of just not feeling like going out tonight for nights on end. Of needing an explanation for everything. Of letting the same neural pathways dictate my life’s path. So, goddammit, I went to Scotland.

On first foot down, I felt entirely at home there. Even as I clutched my meticulously written itinerary in my homemade journal, I was completely okay. From the moment I landed in Edinburgh to the welcoming hospitality of friend-of-friends Jan and her sister Morag, to the moment Jan put me back on the Tram nine days later, the fear I had been brewing for the previous months had alchemized into something else entirely. I was open, clear headed– alive. My trip had me starting in Edinburgh, a train to Oban, a ferry to Mull, a bus across Mull, another ferry to Iona and then four days of bookbinding and island views before I took the trip again in reverse. I woke every day at first light, before my alarm, and wandered to whatever landscape or seascape rested outside my bedroom walls. I ran through the Stockbridge neighborhood and laughed aloud at the swans on the pond with the sight of Edinburgh in the background. I jogged along the shores of the North Sea in Oban after a night of indulgent, rich seafood and a glass of whiskey from the oldest distillery in Scotland. I ran through the oldest preserved nunnery from the Middle Ages on Iona, its thick walls only partially standing as it faces the Isle of Mull across the short channel. I walked around Arthur’s Seat with two new friends and drank a pint that nearly knocked me on my ass afterward. I ate fare lovingly prepared in the homes of never-strangers-again and thick potatoes in the corner of a dark pub on St. Patrick’s Day.

I wrote down every oat cake I ate (my new favorite food), every Tram, ferry, train, plane or bus that I took. I unwrapped the homemade pesto and tomato sandwich with grapes that Jan had made me for the train previously, and reveled as I acted the part of brooding author and ate them one luxurious bite at a time, hovering over my journal for the three hour trek from Edinburgh to Glasgow to Oban. I have never known the feeling of care as I did to have a sandwich packed for me for the train. Or when Annette or Linda on the island brewed a cup of coffee for me. Or when I slipped into the fluffy, wearable towel lent to me by Rachel after taking a cold swim in the North Sea. I was alive, alive, alive alive and I could hardly stand to close my eyes at night for the wait it would take to open them to be alive again.

All this for walking toward what I was afraid of. It’s an uneven trade, in my favor.

I suspect that what we mean when we say we are going to do what makes us afraid is that we are actually afraid of staying where we are. That to stay still and to do only what we know will comfort us to death. We will smother on our own security blanket of income, of home, of people we know. To do what we are afraid of is to, in fact, do what we are made for– to explore more deeply, more sincerely the plentiful gift of time that we are allotted.

My first hour on Iona I was met by my teacher, Rachel, who I admired for five years, welcoming me to her and her husband John’s croft. After a brief lunch and introductions– by this point, the five of us attending the workshop were well acquainted from the ferry and the bus and were by all accounts a family– we were given our reign of time.

“Go below the sheep field and you’ll be on the beach. Go right and you’ll find the seaglass beach. Go left and it’ll take you to the Carraig an daimh where there’s a raised beach full of beautiful rocks where the sea level used to be.” I chose left. Rachel gave me further instruction– walk the sandy beach until you come to the rocks. Cross the rocks– wear suitable boots– and cross a second sandy stretch. This will take you to the part of Iona known as The Great Silence– where hermits and spiritualists retreat to know no sound and person. Then cross one bog, go through the mounds and take a right at the fence. A short ways down you’ll see a widening of the fence. Crawl up and over the barbed wire and you’re there.

Seemed simple enough.

I took off, hardly able to keep myself from running the first stretch of sand, letting the imprint of seaweed in the sand, bright ocher lichen, and thick watery inlets catch my attention. I hopped the rocks like a kid– invincible, incapable of tiring. I yelled to the ocean and it waved back. The bog caught me up past my boots and I pressed, finding sheep bones and bits of rope. Through the mounds and down to the split, I’d carefully crawled my way over the barbed wire by levying between the fence post and a boulder until the land opened again and I was on the long expanse of beautiful big stones, mostly Mull Granite, and hurried to the water.

I am here! I yelled, laughing and crying, I am here and I am HERE!

I touched the water and turned back to the cliffs, climbing each one til the rocks became too slippery or something told me to turn back. I was an explorer, alone, a child and an ancient spirit touching the everything at once, and I had never known fear. On my way back I met my teacher on the beach, fresh from a swim with her dog Snuffy, and told her about my small Christopher Robin sized adventure.

“I’m so overwhelmed and I want to save my crying or I won’t have any left,” I said. She made a comforting noise of agreement and then offered me a towel to take a swim in the freezing North Sea. I gladly accepted.

And it was in this way that I spent my days on the Isle of Iona. Magically and without stopping. Toward the end of my stay, Pauline– our talented cook who turned fennel and leeks and rhubarb into a sort of fairy tale version of food– said plainly, “I have never seen anyone take advantage of the island like you have.” Doing what I am afraid of was paying off.

The second to last night we had a special dinner in the barn, decorated with lights and with a wood stove burning, the sound of the wrens nesting down for the night. We exchanged stories and songs and poems, and John– Rachel’s husband and the caretaker of the croft we were staying– told us of Iona, its history and lore. He held up a map of the island and the surrounding Hebrides and pointed to the various channels.

When you look at a map now, he explained, you think of the land being the positive space and the ocean being the negative space. But when Iona was found, it was the opposite. The ocean was the positive space and the land was less traversed. People traveled by way of sea roads. Almost all of the population lived by the sea, traversing by boat and channel to get to other cities and trading posts. In fact, land was considered dangerous. The further inland you traveled, the closer you’d encounter the marauders, the thieves, the dangerous people who had little to no place in polite society. This wild, untamed, brooding water was the safest way out and home again.

I held this idea as I went for my last swim in the freezing sea on Monday morning. By this time, I’d worked up my stamina to 26 strokes out and 26 back again. This coming a long way from the quick dip and post maniacal laughter from the shock of the water on day one. I was full of awareness of the sea and its ability to take me– if not from cold, then by current– and disappear me to the bottom with no recourse. I’d adopted a mantra when my feet touched dry sand again– thank you for letting me in, thank you for letting me go. It was a prayer and a risk and a shudder of relief, and also a reward for walking toward what I was afraid of. The short ritual of it gave me wonder that I might be friends with the sea, now. In response, the last wave pushed me up to land and seemingly hugged my legs for longer than the duration of its laps. There where the water receded, a beautiful piece of Mull Granite rested. When I picked it up, it fit my hand perfectly, the pink speckles growing duller as it dried. Thank you I said, and began walking back to start my journey home. I was no longer afraid. I would be taking a plane, of course, but the thought of crashing into the sea, of my last breath being taken by this water was no longer a spine numbing fear, but a small comfort. So it would be if it would be. By land or sea, I’d be going home.

I have been landlocked for over a decade before this trip. While I pride myself on being an open minded liberal type, the truth is I’m human and therefore fearful of what I don’t know. I am less so, now.

Last Saturday night, my country bombed Iran in an act of control and unnecessary power. As I watch the screens, increasingly filled with white men explaining why this was important, why we should be afraid, how they have solved a non-existent problem, I am struck by the ways I fooled myself into believing they were the safer road. All my life I have been trained to believe that here in the middle of this land are the heroes, the allies, the fathers of protection. But as I look at the map, I am seeing the truth that the water brings. That the further inland, the further locked and narrowed we become inside this block of land, the more dangerous it is. I have to find a way out– of this physical land, of this way of thinking. Because for all that I was taught to be afraid of out there, the danger is still only in here.

Of course, I have been rejecting the patriarchy for years. But in light of the sea roads, of changing the perspective from negative to positive, I am seeing these men even more clearly for what they are. Humans who have never done what they are afraid of, but have rather worked to control their own comfort. And their comfort is quite literally killing us all.

Back here in the States I am trying to stay awake. I am considering horseback riding this summer, or maybe climbing Mt. Washington. The sound of Iona and the view of Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat at sunset still roll into my heart’s memory like waves, and I am reminded to move toward my discomfort. Sometimes by ordering something new from the menu. Sometimes by speaking out against our increasingly authoritarian government. Sometimes by reminding myself that no matter how tired I am, this is only ever once, and my perceived safety of I-80 across the United States is someone else’s biggest fear. And back and forth I flip my brain this way– negative space to positive space and again and again– so that I can do more than just do what I am afraid of. I can be alive.