Perhaps you seen, or even been, the child who approaches the high dive, looks down, pauses, climbs back down the ladder, climbs back up the ladder, goes back down the ladder, climbs up the ladder again, pauses, looks, and finally takes the big jump. Somehow, in the climbing and the looking down and the watching others jump and survive and race to jump again, the fear doesn’t necessarily go away, but the longing for the sense of flying grows until it outweighs the fear, and the scales tip.
What leap into the unknown have you taken in spite of the fear?
Late on the night of the Nov. ’16 election, I plunged into a deep grief, worse than after death of a loved one. People find me exceptionally calm, but that night, I cratered.
This grief triggered some equally deep self-assessment. I reread a Martha Beck column on personal integrity that I had torn out of an Oprah magazine many months before. She describes “personal integrity” as living in alignment with what we know, on a deep level, to be true. She said departing from your truth is the real enemy of joy.
I have my own blog dedicated to the skills in which I train people to get what they need from others, while building bridges, rather than burning them. I had put some of my truths on the back burner, waiting till I had built more trust or more credibility or a larger following before directly applying my skills to politics. And I feared losing a loved one who has different political views from mine.
It was scary, but I took a leap. I decided to started blogging about politics, but in ways consistent with the persuasion and consensus-building skills I teach. I knew that speaking my truth didn’t have to mean ranting, sarcasm or blurting out things without considering timing and choice of words. In fact, ranting, sarcasm, etc. minimize the chance that people with different views listen to what we say and think about it. Rather, it inspires them to dig deeper into their own views.
So I resolved to use my blog to model ways to speak one’s truth in ways that minimize needless “wrong making,” and are, therefore, more effective. As soon as I had made that decision, an indescribable peace settled on me. My health even improved. And, while I may have lost some followers, I have found that overall readership of my blog has actually increased.
I believe that you are expressing thoughts in a beneficial way that others of us think but are unable to express so clearly and beneficially . Thanks.
Thanks, Patt. The most rewarding thing in the world to me is hearing that I have helped someone.
Refusing to step forward to join induction into the Armed Forces of the United States of America, September 1969. My wife, a Los Alamos National Lab 27 year employee, has never forgiven me. I have never been a pascifist, but refused to follow to put myself in a situation such a “go kill everyone on that village over there.” I read all the Selective Service (draft) laws and memoranda, and came up with a prohibitive defense. Nothing ever happened to me.
In later life, I met and conversed with a man, rather incidentally on a van trip home, both of us from separate holiday trips. Even though I had experienced other, earlier relationships with men in whom I had little confidence or trust, I intuited that this time it was different. A phone call the next day allowed us to introduce each other over lunch. For the next ten years, I grew to trust and respect Will, and it allowed me during our time together until his death, to have more confidence and acceptance of my self in this type of mutual relationship. I will be forever grateful that we met.