Throw your soul through every open door.

Every day when I'm working at my desk, I see this magnet over my monitor: WHAT WOULD YOU ATTEMPT TO DO IF YOU KNEW YOU COULD NOT FAIL?  It sits alongside my Alice's Adventures in Wonderland magnets, including one about believing in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

I've been thinking a lot about this question lately.  I posed it on my Facebook fan page a couple of days ago, and I've asked a couple of other people what their response would be.  Some would open businesses, like bars or restaurants or floral shops, and some would have loftier aspirations, including saving the world.  At least one person told me he didn't know if he could really bother to think about it to answer, simply because he's so pragmatic as to realize that everyone would eventually fail at everything, given enough time.  (An infinite number of typing monkeys, I suppose.)

Fear of failure drove me to be a slacker, to be a highly gifted underachiever.  When I was finally challenged to do my true best, I quickly realized it was a much softer fall from Near-the-Bottom than from Near-the-Top.  I padded my ass, literally and figuratively, and did everything in my power not to be hurt, not to feel disappointment—whether from myself or from others. 

Living up to that fear meant I opted to ignore a lot of opportunities, though that also means I opted for other things, even if by default.  There are very few occurrences in my life that I felt were out of my control.  Of those few, there were even fewer that couldn't have been avoided in some way by my own prior choices.  Sometimes my choices were made to make my life easier, or at least less difficult or transitional.  Sometimes I made choices that I knew would be hard as hell but were for the best.  And every so often I would choose to do the unexpected—often because I was bored or distracted—even though I knew it was the bad choice, just because I needed something to be different. 

The thing about opportunities is that you don't always know them when you see them.  Sometimes you can only see those swinging doors in hindsight, often when it's too late to loop your path back before the seal is shut tight.  It's those truly momentous prospects that force the unexpected juncture, that dazzle you with enough giant, flashing arrows to turn your course into the Vegas Strip—those are the ones that offer the most to lose and to gain, sometimes simultaneously. 

This has been a few months of unexpected opportunities, certainly.  Some have come at me from the dark, almost like an angler fish taunting its prey with its bioluminescent lies.  Some have laid themselves carefully across my path and requested ever so politely that I give them a moment of their time.  And some have grabbed me and spun me around to face them, to look them in the eyes and pay attention to them, no matter how much I thought I wanted to look away. 

Regardless of how the opportunity presents itself, the ultimate choice is mine to make, alone.  So now I'm choosing not to be afraid of failure, not to let my self-doubt and fear influence me unduly.  I'm forcing myself to open my eyes, to pay closer attention to my surroundings so that I have the best chance possible of not missing those giant, flashing arrows.  I also have less ass now, literally and figuratively, and I know I'm much more likely to feel it fully when I fall. 

But I also know that the worst thing that happens, if I fall, is that I get scraped up, a little battered and bruised.  I will do my best to laugh boisterously about it while I'm dusting the bits of gravel from my scrapes.  After all, those bits came from the path I've made, and I'll use them again to keep laying my groundwork, stepping ever-so-excitedly forward to my next great experience.

Comments

[Cheryl, Castro Valley, CA]

You go girl!