Try-Umph

Crossing the natural spillway where the lower lake pauses before reaching the brink of its fall (a decision I made to avoid an additional forty-five minutes of hiking in the freezing mist that had moved in), I carefully plotted my route, rock by rock in real time. The first few steps felt daring, like an adventurous Twister game without the plastic mat of brightly colored dots. I was a kid again, riding my bike along the top of a three-foot tall by one-foot-wide concrete barrier wall that surrounded my elementary school. Fear of falling wasn’t a factor. I was footloose and fancy free. 

Testing half-submerged rocks for stability, I moved steadily though not quickly across the top of the icy water. 

I chose landing pads, locked in on targets, solved problems before they became them. I tightened my core and deepened my breath. I was a ninja defying frigid peril, measured step by measured step by measured step.

Then I looked up to check my progress and panic swallowed me like the whale that devoured Jonah.

Suddenly, I knew not what to do.

The rock my right foot was balanced on shimmied just a bit. The obvious but precarious next step toward a dicey severed log would require a stretch I couldn’t count on making. My pulse quickened. My breath turned shallow and short. I was marooned—a lake to my left, a waterfall to my right, and a farther path back than the path that stretched out in front of me.

Reaching down, I put my hands on two adjacent rocks.

There, crouched awkwardly above the rolling water, I stalled, acutely aware that I was in a place I hadn’t been in quite some time. And it had nothing to do with the mountain I was perched on in Colorado.

Frozen in the middle of the spillway, I had a stand-off with myself.

After a few seconds which felt like hours, I set my jaw, adjusted my rusty point-guard spine, and focused on the task. Clearly, I would not be rescued. No one was around and I couldn’t untangle my layers enough to ever find my phone. If I was going to get to the other side, I would have to figure out how to get there by myself. 

The next first step was crazy scary. 

The second not as much.

Then the ones that followed unfolded like a game of hopscotch as I danced my way toward dry land. On sturdy footing there, the gurgling water giggling behind me like an audience entertained, I felt as if I’d burst through the finish line at Boston. I pranced around like Rocky, gloves above my head.

The rush of doing something that I wasn’t sure I could do lit up my insides. The accomplishment didn’t make me think I could climb Mt. Everest or enter an Ironman or even work the smart remote that routinely so confounds me. But I recognized an internal boundary stretch. 

And conquering the impasse gave me access to stuff that had been walled off—that collection of debris that hovers when we do and do and only do that which we know we can. I pushed a specific mental and physical border, but when one boundary line stretches, the others also shift. Weirdly, the reaching jostled all my pieces/parts. 

Later that night when I pulled my laptop out to write, the words fell out as if a dam had broken. Could it be that other stuff got easier because I forced myself to do a thing that was kinda hard?

It's sometimes good to dance with uncertainty.  To look a thing you’re not sure you are capable of doing in its mocking eye. The tango with what we maybe can and maybe cannot master grants us admission to our own expansive capabilities. A ticket price that’s laced with try-and fail-and-stall-and-push. I was reminded by the treacherous path I could not be sure of, that it is my job to seek such slight discomforts. Gates of competence don’t typically swing open on their own.

P.S. The Way Back