The next prompt for me, Bryce, of things that my kids should know about me, is to “Describe 3 legitimate fears you have and how they became fears.”

This is an interesting one. We don’t usually like entertaining, let alone describing, our fears. We like to tuck them tightly away where we can safely ignore them. Our fears make us uncomfortable. They cause us stress and anxiety. But it’s good to know what they are in any case, so that we might deal with them, and eventually overcome them.

Ok, enough with the platitutdes.  Here are three of mine:

1. I have a legitimate fear that I will never make it into a line of work that I feel is truly valuable to mankind, where I can use my talents to do something truly worthwhile that makes a positive difference in the world. I try to do plenty of those types of things on the side, as hobbies, in the moon light, but I spend the majority of my waking energy during the day working for an employer who has profits square in its sights. Most every employer does. I’m sorry, but making money is not a worthwhile pursuit of itself. As I just read this morning, “Profit isn’t a purpose, it’s a result. To have purpose means the things we do are of real value to others.” There can be nothing so devoid of real value as simply making a buck. Yes, it keeps the machine running and the lights on, but it does nothing else. I fear that I will spend the rest of my life working under this guise that making money is valuable, honorable, and worthwhile, and that we should spend all of our waking energy to do everything we can to make the most money we possibly can dream of. I’m simply don’t agree with that.

   How did this become a fear? I read a book by Hugh Nibley called Approaching Zion (you can read it online here), gifted on my birthday early in my marriage from my in-laws, which has become one of my favorite books of all time. It changed my life and my perspective on everything. It contains some of the most powerful essays I have ever read about what our real purposes should be here on this Earth. Yet, most of us keep walking to the beat of the drum, we keep running on the rat wheel, and just like the rat we never get anywhere, never get around to doing anything of real value for humanity for our entire lives. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my tombstone to read, “He made money.” I don’t want to approach the end of my life and wonder what my life did for the world. I want to do much more than that. I want to make the world a better place to live, a more happy place, a place where we can cultivate our minds, where we can learn and grow and develop our character, where we can do work that matters, not just to make a buck. We can change the world as long as we don’t surrender our will to the love of money.

2. I have a fear that I will die prematurely. I drive a good 40 miles every day for my work, and I have a real fear that I will get in a fatal accident before I have had a chance to raise my family, and do the work of my life (see #1). I’ve seen the statistics, and it doesn’t look pretty. The most dangerous activity we engage in every single day is step into an automobile.  It’s really bad. In my age group (25-34 yrs), motor vehicle accidents are the #1 cause of death. That’s scary. I don’t think many people know that. It’s also the #1 cause of death in the age groups of 1-4 yrs, 5-14 yrs, and 15-24 yrs old.  So, since you’ve already done the math, let’s just state the facts. From age 1 to 34 years old, the #1 leading cause of death in the USA is from motor vehicle accidents. I don’t know about you, but that is just crazy!  What are we doing to reduce motor vehicle accidents? This should be our society’s #1 priority! And yet, here we are, with this extreme hesitancy, road blocks, legislation, push back, and fear about autonomous vehicles. I will bet that most motor vehicle accidents occur because of driver error. Autonomous vehicles would reduce errors to near zero. We think that computers will get us into accidents. Yet, a computer doesn’t get distracted. A computer doesn’t reach for a spilled cup of coffee, or for a Big Mac. A computer doesn’t have to look over its shoulder to change lanes, and hence take its eyes off the road ahead. There are so many advantages to letting computers take hold of our steering wheels, and the #1 advantage is that it will dramatically drop the number of motor vehicle accidents and deaths in the world. It will nearly eliminate driver error as a cause of death. It is the most silly way to die I can think of. We are all human, and make mistakes, but we shouldn’t die because of it. We should be doing everything we can to make our vehicles autonomous as quickly as humanly possible, and reduce the number of needless deaths that happen each year.

   How did this become a fear?  A few years ago I witnessed a motor vehicle accident on I-15 where a young women, about my age, died as a result of the injuries sustained in her accident. I was driving to work when I witnessed a Honda Civic slide sideways and come to a stop in the middle of the freeway, in between lanes. I had time to think, “they better get out of the way or they are going to be hit.” Sure enough, a split second later, a semi-trailer truck broadsided the Civic on the driver side door at probably 50 mph. The Civic spun around a couple times before coming to rest on the side of the road. The driver side door was bashed in about 2 feet.  As my car approached the wreck, I could see the young woman take one of her last conscious breaths before closing her eyes and slumping over the steering wheel. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe that I had just seen what I had seen.  I quickly pulled over to the shoulder, and rushed to the car to see what I could do to help. Several other witnesses also stopped to help. We tried to stabilize the woman’s head and neck as best we could until the paramedics came. There was almost no driver’s side door left, but others were able to get into the car enough to give support. The paramedics arrived, and had to extract her from the vehicle with the jaws of life. Life flight landed on the freeway to transport her to the hospital. Later that day I learned from the news that this young woman perished at the hospital from internal injuries. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I had just witnessed a young woman, a UVSC student on her way to school, get her life ripped from her hands by being cut off by another driver. That was the suspected cause of the accident after further investigation. The car and driver that cut her off didn’t stop, and were never found.

   What a tremendous shame! What a needless loss! What a trajedy that we allow happen every day, dozens of times a day, in our very own community where we live! We have the power to fix this. We have the technology to eradicate it, the freedom to move from one place to another without fearing for our lives. How long will it take to make a change? How many lives will be lost while we banter about and fear innovation and new technology? I will continue to fear every day I step into my car until my life is not held in my own feeble hands, or the hands of other drivers on the road. Just yesterday I saw a car almost broadside another driver’s side door at about 30 mph, just a quarter mile from my work. I just shake my head and wonder when this insanity will end.

3. The last fear I’ll share is that I fear I’ll never be able to do everything that I’m expected to do. Thousands upon thousands of responsibilities are heaped upon us, and I’ve found that the reality is that I will never be able to get to all of them. I don’t have enough time or strength. I fear this. I fear that I will focus on the wrong things, that some things won’t get done, that I’ll miss something important. I worry about this every day.

   How did this become a fear? I think I really recognized it when I was on my mission. I tried making a written list of all the things that we, as missionaries, were taught that we should do on a daily basis. It ended up being a long list. I then tried to schedule my morning, lunch, and evening time so that I could do all of them. Since these were daily activities that we should do, I figured that I could do them every day, without fail. I scheduled my time down to the minute. I then gave it a try. I think I was successful in doing everything on my list maybe once. Every other day I failed to do all the things I should have done, that I was taught to do on a daily basis.

   So I have come to the realization that I will not be able to do all the things that are expected of me every day, that we are taught we should do. It bothers me. It unsettles me that we can’t do everything we’ve been asked to do. I find respite in Elder Oaks’ conference talk “Good, Better, Best.” There are activities that are good, there are others that are better, and there are some that are best. We have to prioritize. It is better to get the best things done than to miss those in favor of the good or better ones. The difficulty is in appropriately selecting the best things. And I fear that I do a poor job at selecting the best things to do every day.

So there you go. A bit of a wild ride through the landscape of Bryce’s fears.