This morning at the park, I found myself walking on this curb, carefully placing one foot in front of the other as if on a balance beam.
I was reminded of doing gymnastics in 5th Grade. For some reason, gymnastics was a very serious focus back then - at least it seemed to me that we spent a lot of time on it. I went to a private school with a lot of beautiful equipment - we even had a separate boy's gym and girl's gym on opposite sides of the campus, and boys did boy-things and girls did girl-things. Girls were expected to do gymnastics. I remember thinking, there is no way that I am going to be able to maneuver my body around those sadistic looking contraptions (well, I didn't think "sadistic" back then - more like, totally scary!), flying through the air with only the power of my limbs and my coordination to keep me from plummeting to the ground. No way.
One day I was watching this girl on the parallel bars. Her first name was O'Hare, and she was a very pretty Irish girl with thick, dark hair and white skin, and she was good at gymnastics. Plus she was one year older than me which increased her cool quotient a thousandfold. She did some kind of flippy thing and then reached for the top bar, and missed. And fell. And broke her wrist, right there, right in front of us. Some dumb kid said "the bone is sticking out!" and I don't know if it was or if it wasn't, but my mind conjured up an image of what that would look like. Not good. She was screaming and crying and holding her wrist and everyone was running around trying to help her and I just stood there, frozen. I thought for sure she was going to die. There was no way that was happening to me. No way.
After that, I had a recurring nightmare about the circus. I always disliked the circus - the whole experience just made me uncomfortable and nervous. Death-defying acts? Lions swiping at the lion-tamer? Scary clowns in your face? Not for me. In my nightmare, the tightrope walker is performing her act, without a net, and she falls. She breaks her wrist. The bone is showing, poking out through the skin and covered in blood. And I am frozen...watching, watching. Can't look away. Horrified.
Somehow that year, I got up the courage to try the balance beam, the parallel bars, and the vault. The parallel bars were my favorite, ironically. The vault was fine after I got the hang of propelling myself from the springboard over the vault, and not into it.
The balance beam was hard for me. I didn't like being up there with nothing to hold onto. I couldn't stop thinking "don't fall off, don't fall off" and my thinking distracted me from actually being able to do much of anything. But, boredom proved to be the thing to conquer my fear. It really wasn't that fun just to walk across it or sit on it. So I started trying some stuff - and I fell off a few times. And I got back up. It was fine, and I started to forget about falling down. I accepted that it was going to happen sometimes, and it did, but in between I learned to somersault and spin around and do a spiral and even a cartwheel. And it was fun!
The balance beam is the most like life for me. It's easy to be afraid, especially when you see bad things happen to other people. You can be safe if you don't participate, but then nothing much happens. You can tell yourself that there is no way that you are going to reach your goals, or do something fantastic. Or you can accept that there will be setbacks, mistakes made, and it is all part of the process. And when you stop saying to yourself "don't fall off, don't fall off", it is amazing to find out you are stronger and more capable than you think, and that you can achieve things beyond your wildest dreams. Also, it's a lot of fun.
