Lindsay France

Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick '09 speaks at the Soup and Hope series at Sage Chapel. Myrick encouraged those in attendance to overcome fear by finding perspective.

In a talk about hope, City of Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick ’09 shared his thoughts first about fear. Fear is “the largest obstacle any of us can face – any community can face, any individual, any family,” he said Jan. 15 to an audience of more than 300 at the first talk of this winter’s Soup and Hope series in Sage Chapel.

“Fear is one of the most powerful emotions we have,” he said. “It can move us, it can control our actions, it can drive us toward mediocrity… fear is the opposite of hope, of optimism, of inspiration.”

Drawing from anecdotes from his childhood and the challenges he has faced as mayor, Myrick said people can overcome fear by seeking and finding perspective. He used the analogy of standing on a tall building to illustrate his point.

“If you look straight down, all you can see is the distance to the ground, and your fear of falling will overtake you,” he said. But, suppose you look out, he said. You might see firefighters running toward the base of the building with a safety net, or you might see flames behind you engulfing the building. Suddenly, that distance down is put in perspective. “Tackling your fear is the key to survival,” he said.

Soup and Hope Series
The next Soup and Hope speaker will be Brian Patchcoski, associate dean and director of Cornell's LGBT Resource Center. Patchcoski will speak about "unexpected journeys" and a willingness to "trust the process" in finding one’s path in life. Patchoski will speak at noon on Thursday, Jan. 29 at Sage Chapel.

Perspective comes from three places, Myrick said: stories of other people overcoming their fears; your own past; and friends and family who believe in you.

Myrick used events in his past as examples, ranging from his childhood years living in cars, with friends or in homeless shelters, to his first romantic break-up at age 13 to his run for mayor at age 24.

“Everyone in this room has been through pain, has been through loss, has been through suffering, sometimes on a monumental scale, sometimes in an everyday moment,” he said. “We are here, we survived failure … and we are stronger from what we learned from it.”

Myrick also cautioned against letting other people’s fears rule us. When he wanted to bring fireworks back to Ithaca for the Fourth of July, everyone he talked to said that he would never be able to raise the money. Yet he raised $15,000 in the first week and funded fireworks for three years in a row.

The Ithaca Commons project is another example. His greatest fear is failure, Myrick said, and problems with the deteriorating infrastructure under the Commons had been well known for more than a decade. Each time funding was sought to address it, either from agencies in Ithaca or from the state or federal government, it was denied. With the help of New York Sens. Gillibrand and Schumer – and creative revisioning of “downtown,” Myrick said – Ithaca got funding and in spite of obstacles that arose during the project, it is approaching completion.

“Fear can stop us,” he said, “making us too afraid to take the first step, too afraid to zoom out.” No one can overcome his or her fears alone; you need people who believe in you and to gain perspective, Myrick said. On the night following the fatal truck accident at Simeons restaurant last summer in Ithaca, when he was in shock, Myrick was reminded of a quote from Dostoevsky: “the darker the night, the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief, the closer is God.”