Everyday Heart

The water was a million miles below me, and I couldn’t do it. I could not make the jump.

With a little time, and water, to reflect upon it all, the water was about 33 feet below me, and I was six years old and mildly acrophobic. I was taking a class my mom insisted upon as our new backyard had a pool, and the last of my speedy immersion into swimming was standing on the far-too-bouncy fiberglass high dive to jump into a 20 foot deep pool fully clothed and swim to the edge. I felt okay until I got to the edge of the board and looked down. The water rushed away from me until I felt like I must be standing in a cloud.

Climbing back down that ladder past a bunch of other kids was one of the most humbling moments of my life, and an early clear memory. I was so bothered by it that I ended up passing that phase of the class a year later. Mom decided to let me swim anyway since our diving board was barely two feet off the water. But I never forgot that moment I’d felt as if I just weren’t brave enough to make that leap. How I’d felt like I didn’t have enough heart.

It had been a long time since I thought about that story until my daughter sent me a video the other day:

 

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That’s my two-year old grandson, Landy, winding up at the top of a foam pit and not only going for it, but landing head first. That fortitude is envied by his grandpa in this moment as someone who has shown his heart from the first time he got that chance. Who knows where you may actually land with that sort of heart, dear child.

It’s a quality I also admire in my favorite athletes. That courage to step out and give it everything in front of a literal ocean of onlookers. That is an ice-in-your-veins type of moment that most every human being aspires to. For every success you see a player have on the field, court, or floor, there were countless failures that preceded it. So many athletes at the professional level claim to have had the fear of failure burnt out of them by repetition after repetition, and failure after failure.

Is that it, then? Is heart and courage of that nature simply a matter of trying over and over again? Developing a quick skin by never quitting? It’s surely at least some measure of the equation, as repeated failure can do a couple of things: 1) Teach you lots and quickly about how to succeed, even if by sheer dumb process of elimination.  2) Show you that there are far worse – and scarier – things than failing.

How many times have you heard this Confucius quote thrown out?

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”

But that also can’t be all of the equation, of we wouldn’t see examples of athletes who finally make their first championship play as tightly as they did as a rookie. Sometimes that adrenaline, excitement, and fear of failure is simply beyond our ability to control. So what else goes into that intangible? What gives one person that immediate heart and courage, while another needs time to conquer their fears, while yet another maybe never fully does? What makes up the mindset of a young athlete like a Terrell Davis, going into a Super Bowl game literally blinded by a migraine, understanding that he needed to be so courageous as to play through that crippling handicap if simply to serve as a decoy. That makes a Bernard King gut out a broken leg in a championship game to will his team to success?

The world of pop psychology also offers a tangent into this as well, with everything from MBTI to DiSC to Enneagram showing a sliding scale of “risk-taking” personalities. The world of sport is rife with folks scoring high on this personality-type factor, and no wonder. They games they play are high-risk enterprises in terms of what failure entails. Their paths to the highest levels of their sport were risky ones as well, often having to combine incredible levels of skill with moments of courage and luck to get to where they came to. It takes a unique mindset and fortitude to propel yourself there.

Can that be applied to your every day life? If you’re not the type-triple-A risk-taker who also just happens to have the insane levels of talent, genetics, skill, and luck it takes to become a professional athlete, how do I apply that to my person life? If I didn’t wiggle my windup and jump into the foam pit at the age of two, is it all over for me? Maybe that courage is something we can display with our own brand of daily and ordinary resilience. A learned courage, as it were. The world certainly could stand as many brave souls as it can get these days. The world could use more of that heart, some of that stuff oozing from those examples we see in men and women simply playing their high-stakes games.

If Confucius above couldn’t reach us, then maybe that lesson in every day heart and courage comes from a voice a little less abstract from our era.

“Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that’s pretty extraordinary.”

– Brené Brown