Intrepid means fearless. Fearless means having no fear; without fear.

Neither means me very much.

I guess that I am afraid of the normal things but, no, not death all that much though it does concern me. Maybe more so with the days going by.

As I gaze out the morning window at the morning sun on the chilled morning frost set down upon the field beyond my own event horizon my eyes are drawn upward and over to the trees that now barely screen the still-frozen pond that claimed the life of a neighbor just over three years ago.

He was skating and playing a little hockey with his teen-aged son. Just one more time before the ice had melted away. It had been warm and the ice was no longer strong enough so, simply, and so very sadly and abruptly, took away the likely many years that he had remaining to him by giving way and allowing him to drown somewhere beneath it.

And all right there in front of his son as they were having some fun together. One last time.

I doubt that he ever imagined that would be the way he would perish from this earth.

And still I can only cast imagination at what his son must still recall at wake or deep in sleep.

No, I fear not death at the present moment but, rather, it is life that leaves me far less than intrepid.

I’m not scared of life itself- I’m just scared that I will keep failing at it as I have done far too often these last several years.

Is that irrational or just being too damn self-absorbed?

Gotta be one or the other.

This, all on a chilled and faceless morning when all that could be will not be and all that might still be likely cannot be. Unless I somehow make it so.

Is that so hard to do? Is that too much to ask? Are we to expect less from ourselves than at least a hint at what the better and best souls through time have given over to their own brief existence? To be great or at least head off in that direction?

We should be better, we can be better. But still we rest not upon any laurels but upon the sad and still wanting of them. Cold, hard ground.

What to show as some visible and maybe even slightly important evidence that we not only existed- were and then were not- but that we lived to the fullest of at least one of our imagined capabilities.

What a world it would then could be and how much more happy and satisfied would then be all of us within it. Today and then onward.

I can be. You can be.

But we are not.

We remain much less than intrepid and would not think once about stepping out on to that ice as it continues to thin in the coming and warming sun of yet another day spent here in idling motion.

Even kinetics has its downtime I fear.