Step three.two: Wright Brutha

It was a beautiful day overlooking the Indian Ocean on the southernmost tip of Bali... We join two arch rivals engaged in a serious struggle:

meek: "i think... i think i'm going to pack it in.... i probably shouldn't have started this...."

Mike: "What the fuck are you talking about? You've come this far. Get on with it. We've got stuff to do."

meek: "but... i'm ... i'm scared..."

Mike: "You're SCARED? Its only 250ft for Christ's sake."

meek: "its high enough..."

Mike: "That’s the point. WHAT! You’re telling me that you are afraid of heights now?” he spat with a smirk of superiority which he knew that meek hated intensely.

meek: "no... its just that.. i don't know..."

Mike: "Everything they said about you is true. You don't follow through and you're half ass."

meek: "don't say that... please... i've got enough on my plate right now..."

Mike: "If you don't finish this, I'm gone. I'm dead. I'm not coming back. I'm leaving you with a lame 9-5. You can drive a BMW and cheat on your wife."

meek: "but..... i need you.... don't do this to me..."

Mike: "Well, the ball is in your court. Isn't it?"

I left a lot behind that day. I took a massive amount of self doubt, of external critics (real and imagined), internal criticism, fear and angst... I put it all in a little box and tied it with a solid gold ribbon. I placed it gently on the top of that cliff and stepped off into the prevailing trade winds.

Nobody died that day. However, I am a step closer to understanding what drives me. I have a MASSIVE fear of failure; stronger than I thought. As a coping mechanism, I incent myself by making failure SO unattractive that I can't help but rise above it or face lopping off serious chunks of my psyche as penalty. The problem is that in search of black and white, I’ve ended up with black on failure and a thousand shades of gray on the success side. Higher, faster, longer, different, more. I need to work on that. AND heaven help me if I end up on the side of not success.. real failure or just made up to be so.. catastrophic. Black.

Paragliding is relatively safe, but this battle did wage on. From it I understand that my fear of failure has somehow made me a gambler and a risk taker. I don't know what to say about this correlation (it seems a bit suspect), but I feel it all the same. I need to think on this.

In any event, I am taking my license. This was the first of four solo flights that I have to my name, en route to logging 5 hours of flight time for my first rating. It is a beautiful, peaceful and sometimes scary endeavor that has intense meaning for me at this stage of discovery.


I feel truly powerful.. from the inside.. for the first time in a long, long time.. and it only took a week.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This all started with an effort to do "Random Kind Things for My Body", which is here]