On Taking Risks

There is a certain comfort in not really amounting to anything. I have been a server for the last four years. For a year and half, it is pretty much the only thing that I have been. Except for recently, I completely fell off the map as an writer, a reader, a thinker, and certainly as an actor. As I have continued to sit in the familiarity of my own life, a growing dissatisfaction has begun to rear it’s head. I’m pretty sure that the source of this self-disappointment comes from knowing that I am capable of so much more than what I have been doing and have done so far. Sometimes, the possibility or potentiality of my skills and self almost seem to suffice for accomplishment, but as I get older and grow more dissatisfied and disillusioned with the life that I have established for myself so far, I become less content with not taking risks.

Sure, I could wait tables forever. I know how to do it. I’m good at it. But this is not what my gifts are for. I get by at doing it with relative ease, but remain miserable. My unrealized potential tells me that I’m gifted enough to do anything I would want to do (not that I could do anything - but anything that I desire to do I believe I’m equipped for), yet the longer I stay dormant, the less energy I have to put myself out there and try to find something I believe in doing.

It’s this damn matter of the learning curve that has got me sitting on my ass. My perfectionism astounds me. With my overdeveloped intuition, I have gotten used to understanding things readily, but this normal blessing has become a curse for me. It’s like if I can’t get it right immediately, it’s not a problem with me, it’s a problem with the thing - it’s un-gettable - so I figure, “Screw it. I’ll try something else.” When I examine my life over the last 23 years, I find that most of my frustration and the things that have led me to give up on something has stemmed from this perfectionistic pessimism. Of course, when I was younger, even this perfectionism led me to try different things. I couldn’t get the piano right away, so I started playing guitar. Not only have I learned to quit things once they prove difficult, but I’ve also picked up the nasty habit of not trying anything at all lest I should have to try at something that doesn’t come readily to me. “When the going gets tough, Christian gets gone.”

It’s as if each new experience - potential risk, let’s say - feels like jumping off the high-dive. I stand at the edge of the board, looking at the water below, seemingly a mile away. Sadly, this is as far as I get to the act of jumping. And this is what everyday feels like to me. I’m so tired of standing at the edge of the board, and the longer I stand here and tell myself that it is only my fear that makes the dive seem so perilous, I start to believe that, in reality, the fall is no more than 6 or 7 inches to the water, and I’m not on the high-dive at all. It's that first jump that is the scary one. It's before the leap that I'm in trouble. But what about afterwards?

There may be some residual fear on the other side of finally taking the jump, but the experience has also taught me that it's not really that bad. I remember one time when I actually was jumping from a high point. The cliff was forty or fifty feet high, it took every ounce of courage that I had to throw myself off the edge, trusting I wouldn't be smashed against the water below - an irrational fear, but a fear nonetheless. I jumped. I survived. The thrill was indescribable. Of course, I climbed back up the cliff to get ready to jump, charged with the energy of the first success. When I got to the top, I was reminded of how scary the leap was initially, but quickly, I was able to convince myself that it hadn't been too bad the first time, and that was enough for me to do it again. I guess the point is that while it's going to be scary every time, and my feet may sting more sometimes than at others, the jump is still worth taking. This is the thing that makes life worth living. If I had stood at the cliff for too long, I never would have jumped, and I either would have been stuck up there forever, or had to climb down (always harder than climbing up).

When we get to the place in life where we see that we need to take a leap, it is important to not let the terror take over and cloud our judgment of the situation too much. It's right that it should be terrifying and that we should be anxious about throwing ourselves into some sort of oblivion, subjecting ourselves to the indifferent law of gravity, however, this fear cannot get the last word. It is what leads to deadly inertia.

The longer we, I, stand atop the cliff looking at the water, the harder it's going to be jump.

Why wait?