Leaping

/ still a dreamer

This image is currently on my desktop and that little kid puts a smile on my face and makes me think.

When I look at her, I see she is doing exactly what she – a mountain goat kid – is supposed to be doing and what comes naturally. Leaping. She’s not thinking about it or getting all nervous about it or wondering will she twist her ankle if she leaps really high. She just leaps.

Were it that easy for us humans. Okay, I’ll speak for myself. Over the course of my life I have taken numerous leaps of faith, and often without any tangible safety net. Each time, I truly amazed myself because clearly, I didn’t think I had it in me.

I was musing earlier about the time when I got on a plane to Portugal at 21 years old to visit my cousin who lived in a tiny fishing village in the farthest point north of the country. I’d only been on a plane once, and never abroad. What was funny in retrospect is that I was too young and naive to even know what a leap of faith I was actually taking. My flight was delayed at JFK by 6 hours and was going to get me into Lisbon far later than my cousin and I had planned and I had critical train connections to make. There were no cell phones, no means of communication like that and I was alone. In my utter panic, because of course I had not thought to learn any Portuguese other than “Bom Dia”, I began asking about for help using my high school French and entreated a bi-lingual Portuguese gentleman to help me. He wrote notes for each of the two train masters and one for, hopefully, a cab at the other end. I arrived after midnight in the pitch black of the countryside, but got delivered safe and sound to my cousin’s house. How did I do it?

Over 10 years ago, I took a very conscious leap of faith to leave a secure job and go freelance so I could pursue my dream of writing and illustrating children’s books. My income was not even covered, but I believed that somehow, despite my many apprehensions, I would be okay. I’d be lying if I said that the time in between hasn’t had its stress, crises and challenges, yet I made it. Except for one thing. I haven’t made nearly the progress I had hoped towards my dream. The next leap is before me.

And that’s where that little mountain goat comes in. Sometimes we can feel like we are suspended in mid-air. We know we jumped; in fact it may have been necessary to jump, or we sorely need to, but how we land depends on us. I want with every fiber of my being to be as sure-footed as that little kid, who knows in her heart of hearts, in the deepest recesses of her mountain goat soul, that she will land safely and securely, most likely on all fours.

Søren Kierkegaard once said, “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.”

I stand at the edge, breathe in my inner mountain goat, and leap.

15 thoughts on “Leaping”

    • Thanks, Andrea. I appreciate the encouragement and admiration both.These leaps are something we’re all called upon to take from time to time (in spite of our doing the procrastination shuffle). Sometimes it’s the only way to go forward. You know I wish all the best to you, too. :-)

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  6. The fact that you didn’t know the language and were savvy enough to find a bilingual person to write notes for you makes me wonder if most kids now would think to do that. All of us are so reliant on phones to do it all…translate, navigate, investigate, hopefully if we get into trouble, we know how to negotiate. And so with those rhyming words, I may have a new topic for a blog. Ha

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    • That I shifted in to such a resourceful-person-mode still surprises me, but you make a good point. If I hadn’t verbally reached out, I would have been a sleeping hobo in the Lisbon train station. Well, I guess someone would have helped me, but if you want to meet life on its own terms, you really do have to look up and be interactive with people sometimes. Kids with their heads down, in their phones, are missing out on the richness and beauty of life. IMHO, of course. :-)

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