I once heard a speaker at a conference say, “You leaped the first time. But will you leap again the next time the ledge comes back around?”
For the life of me, I don’t remember a single other thing he said in his talk. I don’t remember what he was wearing. Or what the room looked like. I don’t know if he was using notes or winging it, had a handheld mic or a lavalier. I couldn’t tell you what kind of chair I was sitting in, what my own outfit looked like, or what day of the week it was. I honestly couldn’t even tell you if it was a quick thirty- minute talk or a full two hours.
But for the last fifteen years or so since I first heard him say it, I haven’t been able to get that one line out of my head. Will you leap again the next time the ledge comes back around?
Sitting in that room (whatever it looked like), shifting uncomfortably (in whatever kind of chair it was), I also remember exactly how I felt.
I remember the red creeping up my neck, jumping the hard perimeter of my jawbone, and consuming the flesh of my cheeks in an instant. I remember how it was somehow both hot and icy- stinging chill at the same time, like a controlled burn setting wildfire to a hornet’s nest. Where you’re not really sure if it’s the flames or the venom that will kill you first.
I remember how I could taste the adrenaline on my tongue, bitter like battery acid, acrid like two- day- old underarm sweat. It rushed in from the wild- eyed animal parts of my brain, a fight- or- flight flood of survival chemicals that saturated every fiber of my being, made every muscle twitch and ready itself to run.
I know what it feels like to know that you were brave once . . . but that you haven’t been brave again in a really long time.
For some of us, that last big leap we can remember taking had to have been somewhere around the time we took those first few tentative, wobbly steps when we were little. But a hard face- plant early in life quickly taught us that it was safer to just sit still where you are than to continue trying to gain any important ground at all. This group becomes the people who believe it is better to hide in plain sight than to risk falling flat on your face in front of everyone ever again.
For others of us, though, we leaped again later in life.
And we somehow stuck the landing.
Sitting in that blur of a vacant room, I knew that I had been incredibly brave once. I had leaped, believing the net would appear (which is just terrible aeronautics advice, by the way— it’s the Schrödinger’s Cat* of goal-chasing).
And that time I had been caught gloriously on the way down. Cirque du Soleil style. Fate had grabbed me by the hands in a tight wristlock and flung me in a triple somersault all the way back up to this highwire act of every dream I had been chasing.
And I guess I just thought from that moment on . . . life would always feel this way.
*In the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, a cat is placed inside a box with a radioactive atom and some poison that may kill it, but we are not sure. So long as we don’t look in the box, the cat’s fate can be both dead and alive to us at the same time. It’s the same thing with the net. It might appear, it might not. And the only way to find out for sure is on the way down. Except in that scenario, we run the risk of becoming the dead cat.
There is this thing that happens in the movies when the hero finally gets everything they ever wanted.
The score swells, the screen fades to black, the credits roll. What we DON’T talk about enough is how the very next day, the day after everything, the hero has to wake up and go on living. We act as if all our life stories will fit neatly within the confines of the average 120 minutes of a cinematic reimagining. As if once our main character makes it over that first big hurdle, they will never again stumble. They will have ARRIVED.
And in the silver screen economy, arrival is everything.
But then the next day comes. And real life settles in.
Plot idea: We as the hero of our own story get everything we ever wanted in the first five minutes of our film. And then the audience spends the next two hours watching us wake up, pay bills, go to the grocery store, get cut off in traffic, answer angry emails, have trouble sleeping, and walk around with this constant low hum of low- grade anxiety about whether or not our best days are already behind us. It’s not exactly main character energy, is it?
Pretty soon, these long stretches of even more setbacks, disappointments, and failures than we ever could have imagined play out in real time. There is no three- minute movie montage to help us skip to the good part. At times, it even feels like they are playing out in slow motion. Possibly even stuck skipping on repeat.
You now know what it is to stumble.
You now know what it is to land with a thud.
You now know what it is to face- plant as a full- grown adult.
And suddenly you become a person who flinches at the ledge.
Overthinking wants you to exhaust yourself to the point of overwhelm, with the main goal of getting you to shut down and back yourself away from taking the next leap. Instead, when you feel yourself spiraling out, learn to rest your mind rather than pushing harder. Get quiet enough to let the answers find you. This is when you’ll realize you never needed someone else’s step-by-step instructions. You had the blueprint to truly innovate inside you all along.
