Jumping

There's something to learn from climbing a post thirty feet in the air, standing on a 2'x2' platform, and getting ready to jump.

It's a leap of faith.

Ever since I can remember, I've been afraid of heights. Deathly afraid. I was the one who looked at a roller coaster and absolutely refused to even set foot in the line because, or course, it went way too high. Cliff jumping--never. Although, I did learn to climb up a bunch of rock to jump into the Snake River, though it always took me a while to make the actual jump. After that, I didn't have much of a problem jumping into water. But get me high above a bunch of very solid, very hard land, and I start to tremble.

I know I'm not the only one with this problem--I don't think it's so much a fear of heights, but more of a fear of falling. Without meaning to, I tend to picture what it would be like to slip and fall off a cliff or out of a tree, including the part where I hit the ground and smash into a million pieces. Not that that would actually happen, but my mind thinks it would.

That's why, when my singles' ward went to Clas Ropes Course down near Utah Lake, I surprised myself.

There are a lot of things I won't do:

• Drugs and alcohol are a never; it just makes sense.
• Bungee-jumping--what's the point?
• Kiss random strangers.
• Other things that don't come to mind...

Climbing hanging logs with notches in the side and walking along a narrow beam twenty-five feet in the air used to be on that list. So did roller coasters. I think it was when I hit sixteen that I decided life was far too exciting to spend it on the ground. Suddenly I was getting on every roller coaster I could. The Grand Canyon, always a nightmare for me, became the most exciting two weeks I could have spent on a river. But climbing up to a ridiculous height just to jump several feet and try to catch a ring? That still terrified me.

So why did I do everything I could at this ropes course? I really have no idea.

But it taught me something.

Sometimes, life gives you challenges that seem impossible. Really, though, nothing is. With the way the world is, sometimes you just need to jump and hope that the harness (or God, fate, friends, family, whatever) will catch you. Because you'll never reach that other tree unless you decide to take the first step out of comfort and start walking into the unknown. The rewards definitely outweigh the fear.

And it's easier than you think.

The Plan

Plan:

I was reading the newspaper the other day--a rare occasion, let me tell you--and I came to the conclusion (again) that little random columns are really fun. And I want to write one. Here's the problem, and where the plan comes in: to write a column, one has to be hired by a newspaper. To be hired, one has to have experience, experience that I do not have. That's where the blog comes in. Because basically (and yes, I just started a sentence with the word 'because') that's all a column is, just cooler because it is in a newspaper. So here's the plan:

This blog is going to be practice. I'm going to pretend that I'm a super cool columnist and this is my column. Every week, I'm going to write something. My life isn't so epically boring that absolutely nothing happens, so I can't pretend there will be nothing for me to write about. This is the plan. Write a weekly blog, and see what happens.

The things about successful columns is they either have content that everyone enjoys or the author has such a great style that it is impossible not to be entertained while reading their writing. My hope is that I can do both. Not likely, but we'll see what happens. I've slowly been working myself into different sorts of writing styles because I was starting to get bored by my own work (not good), so maybe I'll even try different writing styles in this weekly blog of mine. Here's hoping I can actually make something work in a way that people may actually want to read what I'm writing. Because (starting with it again--get over it) how cool would it be if I could graduate, get a job in publishing, spend a few years doing that (with a little bit of marriage in between), and then go to writing full time once I start having kids (which is a scary thought, and provides yet another reason for an interjected parenthetical statement, even though they are starting to become quite numerous).

So this is my plan. Wish me luck!