Faith

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
– Michelangelo

I had dinner with my mom and sister the other day, and we got to talking about skydiving. We all went for the first time last year, jumping tandem with an instructor, and I mentioned that I’d like to at least go enough times to be able to jump completely solo.

They were both horrified. “I don’t think I could ever jump solo”, my mom said, and my sister agreed – claiming she’d be too scared of screwing it up, certain that she’d find some way to screw up the jump, fail to open her chute or break her legs on the landing.

I’m nervous about those things too, of course – but their total rejection struck me as odd. Most of us walk around talking (and thinking) as if we can handle anything, as if the only thing between us and massive success is (insert obstacle X here). It’s our job, our upbringing, our friends, our debt, our bodies, our sleep schedule – that’s why we haven’t conquered the world, yet. It couldn’t be because, fundamentally, we are not conquerors (or we don’t believe we are).

But then – here’s my family, openly saying that they just aren’t competent or courageous enough to do this thing that hundreds of thousands of people have done successfully before – jump out of a plane, pull a string at the right time, and pull some more strings to land. And not only that they can’t do it right now, but that they don’t think they ever could.

They didn’t trust themselves to do it – the way you might not trust a friend to show up on time or a coworker to do a task well, they didn’t trust themselves to safely land a solo skydive.

We started talking about why they’d said that, and they both had specific reasons for why, specifically, skydiving was something they didn’t trust themselves to do. These struck me as excuses.

Don’t get the wrong impression – my mom and sister are both good people, and not generally cowardly. They didn’t think the issue was a lack of self-trust – they were sure there were things specific to skydiving, not specific to themselves, that made their fears justified.

This made me wonder – are there areas in life where I’m doing this? Things I won’t commit to, won’t pursue, because I’m just not sure I can handle them?

If there are, they won’t look like that from the inside. It’ll feel like I’m held back by circumstance or by very reasonable doubt, even when an outside observer might say “Nope. He’s just scared he’ll mess it up.”

How can I identify these areas – places where I’m not pushing as hard as I should, out of fear, things I haven’t even attempted out of doubt, “obstacles” that are actually convenient excuses to avoid testing myself?

I’m not sure, yet – but it’s worth thinking about. Next post will be about a way around these hidden obstacles.