*This is an excerpt from my new book out 11/11, All In This Together: Stories and Teachings for Loving Each Other and Our World (Sounds True, 2025).
Dear ones,
Once, while traveling through the southern mountains of Thailand, I rode with my teacher, Ajahn Chah, in the back of a small pickup truck. The road twisted along cliffs and through jungled hills. On one side was a steep drop-off that disappeared into the mist; on the other, a wall of green.
Our driver—a young layman—seemed determined to set a land-speed record. He gunned the engine around blind corners, dust flying behind us. Each time we rounded a curve, I imagined a bus or a water buffalo appearing out of nowhere. I held on tight.
I glanced over at Ajahn Chah. His expression was perfectly calm, though his knuckles were white on the rail. I took some comfort in that—if even my teacher was holding on, perhaps I wasn’t failing at being mindful.
When we finally pulled into the courtyard of the distant forest monastery, my whole body exhaled. Ajahn Chah turned to me, his face breaking into a grin. “Scary ride, wasn’t it?” he said.
That simple sentence was the teaching. No lecture on fear, no suggestion that I should have been more composed or mindful—just an acknowledgment of the truth. Scary ride, wasn’t it?
In that moment, I saw that awakening doesn’t mean the end of fear. It means we can hold fear with awareness, without pretending. Fear can be part of the path.
So often we treat fear as a failure. We think, If I were more spiritual, I wouldn’t feel this way. But fear is simply life’s way of saying: pay attention. Something precious is at stake.
Ajahn Chah respected the truth of things. He met the moment as it was—tenderly, humorously, without resistance. His smile said: “Yes, it’s scary. And here we are, still alive.”
When we can look at our own life this way—at the storms, the heartbreaks, the uncertainty—and simply bow to it all, something shifts. Fear loses its grip. The world opens up again.
It’s not that the path becomes easy. It’s that we stop running from what’s real.
And sometimes, in the middle of all of it, the wisest response is still the simplest: “Scary ride, isn’t it?”
Metta,
Jack
