Three Lessons I Learned While Facing My Fear
I love hiking; I hate heights.
I especially hate edges, so scaling a high peak recently in Arizona pushed all my buttons. I was doing my best to stay centered and focused as we climbed and as the ground beside me dropped down dizzyingly, and all was fine, until at one point, the person I was hiking with told me to look to my left. He wanted me to see the place where the helicopters landed to help people in distress—people who had fallen and broken something, people in serious cardiac arrest because the trail was such a steep grind.
(In fact, only a few days before, we had been hiking around the back side of this very peak, and we had seen someone on top waving a big white flag, begging for rescue.)
When I looked to my left to see the landing pad, the world started to spin and it wouldn’t stop. I instantly turned toward the mountain and crouched down to ground and steady myself. It took me a couple of minutes before I could continue up the mountain, because I wasn’t going to quit. I moved low like a gorilla, eyes glued to the ground (although I could not help but lift my eyes to behold the 70-year old man in a speedo waving a huge American flag as he descended).
When I got to the top, I sat as far away from the edge as I could and kept my eyes locked on the rocks. As I settled, I finally found the courage to lift my eyes, and what did I see? A sheer rock face on the other side of a deep gorge, and before my very eyes, a young man scaled the side of that cliff as easily as a salamander. When he got to the top, he started doing one-legged squats right at the edge of the cliff. Everyone around me gasped.
That’s when I noticed something: he only had one arm.
“Are you bleeping kidding me?” I mumbled.
Here I could barely walk up the trail behind the rosy-cheeked Mennonite family, because I was so scared, and there this guy was, rock climbing a sheer cliff. With. One. Arm.
It was easy to beat myself up in that moment—I should have been braver, stronger, more daring and courageous—but as we began our blessed descent, three things occurred to me.
First, climbing to the peak of a mountain when you are afraid of heights *is* brave and courageous. I put on my big girl pants and pushed myself, because I didn’t want fear to win.
How often do we let fear win? We imagine the worst and let that hold us back. We listen to the hissing voices rather than be smart and courageous and see what we are capable of.
That’s the second thing I learned—we are all capable of so many things, even though the world might tell us otherwise.
What had that guy with one arm been told about what he could and could not do? From where I was sitting, it looked like he could have cared less about what people thought he was capable of. He wanted to live and do what he obviously loved.
It was the same thing with Alfred, my Chiweenie. While he wasn’t on that steepest of trails, because dogs weren’t allowed, he climbed every other trail like a bad ass. And nearly every single person who passed us by commented on it. This little seven pound monster was out there, in a big and challenging world, and he was crushing it.
But that’s the third—and maybe the most important—thing. We do not have to be good at everything. We can be afraid. We can say no. We don’t have to climb mountains or sing karaoke or do yoga if we don’t want to.
Let me repeat—we do not have to be good at everything, so can we all please just cut ourselves some slack?
Can we honor our edges, those times and places when we come up against our fears, our histories?
Can we do what we need to feel safe?
Can we celebrate when we choose to push ourselves and do something uncomfortable?
Can we magnify the good and the grit, the ways we do put ourselves out there in places that are hard—to see what might happen?
And can we lift up others who are doing the impossible work of facing their demons?
Can we be safe and supportive presences that are there to cheer everyone else on?
Because my God, being alive is hard *and* amazing, so whatever you do or do not do this week, may you find all kinds of things that feed your soul and help you to live light.