Would You Rather Stay Safe Or Risk Being Free?

“Leap and the net will appear”

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

It’s now mid-February. The decade is nearly two months old. Have your New Year’s res­o­lu­tions gone the way of the trash heap yet? Have you’ve set­tled into your old pat­terns and back to busi­ness as usual?

Per­haps this time you thought you could sneak by the guard at the gate with­out pony­ing up. Maybe you thought you could put off fac­ing your fears and tak­ing on your life and just stay safe on the side­lines. But isn’t that what you’ve already done? Isn’t that why you made those res­o­lu­tions in the first place? Remem­ber, you said this was the year you were going to (fill in the blank)?

Here’s a novel idea: What if you just busted your­self and went for it any­way? What if you just cut through all the non­sense, retired your sto­ries about why you can’t or why it’ll never work or why it’s not the right time or why the uni­verse isn’t sup­port­ing you, etc., and just jumped!

Leap.….… and the net will appear!

What if Julia Cameron is right? What if that’s really the way it works? You declare, with­out evi­dence, your inten­tion, and then you take action, as in leap­ing, and the way then becomes appar­ent. What have you got to lose, besides the illu­sion of safety and secu­rity and your warm seat on the bench?

I know, you want to see the net before you leap. But what if the path ahead doesn’t show itself until you’ve demon­strated your com­mit­ment and will­ing­ness to go for it, be uncom­fort­able, be incon­ve­nienced, and like the Nike ad says, “Just do it”!

Let’s face it: if the pull of your his­tory is stronger than your will­ing­ness to man­i­fest a dif­fer­ent future, you’ll stay right where you are. So if you’re telling your­self you want a dif­fer­ent result and it’s not hap­pen­ing, look to see if what you’re really com­mit­ted to is hold­ing on to your story.

Human beings are mas­ter story tellers, you know. It’s our nature. Life hap­pens and we make up a story about it. We are that we are inter­pret­ing life’s events every moment. So far, so good.

But here’s where things start to get tricky.…. (It seems there’s usu­ally a point where things start to get tricky, have you noticed that?) I guess if it were all straight­for­ward and easy, we’d all have it all fig­ured out and every­body would be enlight­ened and we’d all go on about our merry lit­tle way.

The tricky part

We’re so mas­ter­ful at bring­ing mean­ing to the moment, we don’t even know we’re doing it. The process is trans­par­ent to us, we do it instan­ta­neously. Thus:We for­get that we’re mak­ing it up! Then we pro­ceed to live our lives as if our sto­ries are the truth! We col­lapse what actu­ally hap­pens in our lives into the sto­ries we tell our­selves about what hap­pens.

It’s like bak­ing a cake. You fold all the ingre­di­ents into the mix and you can no longer dis­tin­guish the flour from the sugar from the but­ter, from the eggs. Put it in the oven and bake it for say, 20–30 years or more, ( How long you’ve been pol­ish­ing up your story?) and your cake becomes an impen­e­tra­ble rock. That’s how our sto­ries become our truths. Repeated long enough and often enough, we lose sight of the facts and are left with our per­cep­tions, mas­querad­ing as facts.

The Good/Bad News

OK, you say. So if we’re mean­ing mak­ing machines, what’s the alter­na­tive? If my nature is to inter­pret and make mean­ing of every­thing, how do I not make things up? How can I know the truth?

Ahhh, now we’re get­ting somewhere.

Here’s the bad news: You can’t not inter­pret. You’re always going to make up a story about what hap­pens. That’s the way it is with us humans.

Here’s the good news.….. You can make up any­thing you want. So why not make up a story that empow­ers you to go for­ward? As the sto­ry­teller, you’re the one who chooses the plot, the char­ac­ters, the sub­plots, the action, etc. You can make it up how­ever you want.

What is the truth?

You might not like this.… but the truth is what­ever you say it is. You’re the one who invests your energy in being right about what­ever you think is true. Why not be right about a choice that for­wards your life? You might fall, yes. Your life didn’t come with a money back guar­an­tee. You got a ticket to ride. That’s it. Peo­ple fall some­times and skin their knees or even their hearts.

Not to be crass, but so what? As Rus­sell Bishop wrote in his post last week, some­times our biggest chal­lenges are also our biggest teach­ers. So don’t be afraid to learn. The only real fail­ure is liv­ing your life in such a way that when you reach the end, you look back and are filled with regrets about never hav­ing gone for it.

I have leapt with no net in sight more times than I can count. Some­times, the chasm has been so wide, I’ve been air born for years! I’ve had lots of time dur­ing flight to sec­ond guess and re-think my deci­sion to leap, but since I’d already gone for it, I needed to become cre­ative and fig­ure out how to land.

Some­times I’ve stuck the land­ing like an Olympic gym­nast. Other times, I’ve barely made the net, catch­ing it with a hang­nail. Still other times, I’ve missed the net on the first pass, hit the ground and bounced back up mak­ing the net on the sec­ond pass and still have the bruises to show for it! But I wouldn’t trade those bruises for the a life lived on the side­lines with a clean uni­form and per­fectly groomed nails.

Would you rather stay safe or risk being free?

The choice is really yours. Just ask your­self, “Is the way my life is now the way I want it to be?” If your answer is “Yes, I don’t want to change a thing”, bravo to you, and enjoy the ride.

But if you’ve come to a place in the road where the cur­rent path you’re on no longer serves you, if you feel you’ve out­grown your sto­ries and they now only con­strain you, it’s time to bring those sto­ries to an end and write a new one that opens the door to freedom.

Write down all the sto­ries you’re ready to con­clude. Put them in a fire­proof bowl and set them on fire or put them through the shred­der. Be pre­pared for your ego to jump up and down, fran­ti­cally wave its arms and urgently warn you against doing this. Its job is to keep these sto­ries alive and installed on the hard drive of your life. Delete them and you’re rob­bing the ego of one of its major duties. You’ll have to fig­ure out some other job for it like, chop­ping wood, car­ry­ing water and mak­ing sure all the socks come out of the dryer.

And then go for it. Go for it because you can. Go for it because you must. Go for it because it’s who you are. Go for it because it’s why you came to the planet. Go for it because it’s what the world needs.

Going for it is pulling out all the stops, throw­ing off the shack­les, align­ing with your higher self, attun­ing with your true nature, and say­ing “yes” to all the above. It’s step­ping off the cliff before you can see the net and cre­at­ing what­ever is needed to have you make it to the other side of the chasm.

Maybe you’ll end up invent­ing a whole new tech­nol­ogy for how human beings can get from here to there. Lord knows we could use a few new ideas.

What leap have you not been tak­ing? What story have you used to keep from leap­ing? What leap did you take and how did the net appear? Thanks for shar­ing your thoughts and com­ments below.

Tagged as: courage, dr. judith rich, Freedom, New Years resolutions, Risking, Rx For The Soul, Safety