He came back from the RV place with a sandwich and a decision already made about the order of things. The laundry could wait. The sub went into the fridge first, because that was the errand that had a clock on it, and the rest of the afternoon had none. September on the coast, unhurried daylight, and rswfire went around to the other side of the cab where the deck is — not the cottage side, which sits flat on the ground, but the side that runs out over grade and puts a person up above the earth rather than on it. He sat down. He picked up the camera and held it in his hand, and he started talking about height.
He states that he doesn't like heights. That is the inherited sentence, the one that arrives already formed, and he says it the way anyone says it — as a given. But he says it in the past tense of his own comfort, because the more time he has spent out here, the more the discomfort has thinned. And then he says the thing that is actually the subject: it isn't a fear of heights. It's how his brain works.
What follows is the mechanism, laid out plainly. He describes an awareness of variables — many of them, running at once — and among those variables is the fact that decks collapse. Not as a hypothetical. Because it has happened. He describes tracking the way things connect to each other, the interconnections, and notes that the structure holding him up is a structure he did not build and cannot inspect. Someone else maintains it. Park management, he says, is the system he is being asked to trust. And he states that he doesn't put much faith in humans these days. So sitting out on this deck is a risk he is aware he is taking. Most people, he observes, come out here and never have those thoughts. For him they are simply part of his integrated cognition. He doesn't ignore stuff.
The thread went somewhere else for a moment. He started to bring in something else he'd been thinking about this week, and it slipped — spiraled away, he said, and named it as a normal event rather than a failure. Very fluid brain up here. He asked for a second. And then he found that the second thought hadn't been a separate thought at all; it tied back to the same place. The awareness of the variables is what produces the heightened state of alertness when height is involved. That's the whole structure. It just needed to be walked around to from the other side.
So he named it again, more precisely. Not a fear. A pretty intense feeling, he grants that — but because his feelings are an integrated part of his cognition, the intensity lands somewhere on the same spectrum as the awareness rather than in a separate compartment labeled malfunction. It's layered. It's a part of his awareness of his environment. He had been calling it a fear of heights. He doesn't think it is one. He thinks it's a recognition of his integrated perspective of the environment he's in.
And then the part he flagged as profound: reframing it that way meant he was just sitting out there enjoying it. The alertness was no longer occupying much of the field. He paused over why — said he wasn't exactly sure — and then answered himself in the same breath. He integrated it. He's integrated it. Do you see how that works. The deck was still elevated. Park management was still the system holding the load. Nothing about the risk had changed. What had changed was the word, and the word had been doing more work than the height was.