What Would You Do If You Had No Fear?
by Diane Conway
Inner Ocean $101
Spiritually beached? In the great tradition of Helen Keller ('life is either a daring adventure or nothing') and Ann Landers ('the real trick is to stay alive as long as you live') comes Diane Conway, an optimist with an endearingly atrocious haircut and a flair for inspirational workshops. Conway, who lives on a Sausalito houseboat with her younger husband and mandatory quota of dogs, is the author of a book with a challenging subtitle: Living Your Dreams While Quakin' in Your Boots.
Once asked, the question of the main title - What would you do if you had no fear? - 'produces a divine flash that sets in motion assistance from out of the blue', Conway writes. And Goethe agreed, if with a little less advertorial zest: 'Concerning all acts of initiative or creation, there is one elementary truth that the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred.' In short: a question that should be asked by everyone, and with regularity.
She knows that a single person daring to live out a dream inspires countless others. Adopting the Chicken Soup for the Soul blueprint, Conway includes stories of inspiration: the yachting couple who, when they found they were having a child, opened a butterfly farm; the recovering alcoholic roughneck who learned acting and revolutionised his life by portraying alcoholic roughnecks; the quavering novitiate who was told that, as he was made in God's image, self-improvement was an oxymoron.