Jumping Off Cliffs

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”  – Kurt Vonnegut

I got a quick lesson in driving tight winding Rocky Mountain roads a couple days ago on our way to Aspen when my husband Dave got terribly sick and couldn’t drive anymore.  Needless to say, with Dave, Andreas, and his nanny Emily in the car, I wasn’t about to take any chances.  Honestly, I was happy to be driving and just went along slowly, ignoring the cyclist (as in a person pedaling a non-motor vehicle!) tailgating me.  I figured the 10 MPH warning signs on the narrow hairpin turns (with no guardrail) were there for a reason.  Needless to say, I did NOT go off any cliffs on this occasion.

Life for me has always, to some extent, felt like a string of unexpected events and saying “OK, here we go!” layered over a constant slow and winding path of preparation and just moving through life.  It usually goes like this: I’m going along, doing what I think I should be doing. Then, in Marcia Brady’s immortal words, “something suddenly comes up” that demands attention and a response.  Usually it’s something challenging that I was NOT planning on.  Sometimes these events alter the course of my original plan, but more often, they end up being bursts of activity and learning that become woven into the fabric of what I was already doing.

Oddly enough, it is during this time when decisions are usually the easiest to make because you either have no choice, or you have limited time to make a choice.  You take a leap of faith and say “yes” to something, and figure it out along the way.  Though I am no jazz musician, I imagine improvisation feels a bit like this.  You have a certain set of skills – a language in your ears and fingers – and you employ whatever seems to work at the moment, stretching and plunging forward sometimes, or laying back as needed.  And practicing this jumping and improvising over and over again is what makes you better at it.

The above quote by Kurt Vonnegut rang true to me on so many levels when I came across it a few weeks ago.  It was in the afterward of a book that my very literary friend Katie recommended, “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann.  (I highly recommend it by the way!) The words struck me because these days, I feel like every hour of every day I’m developing my mom wings after receiving the precious gift of Andreas into my life.  But it also got me thinking also about all the leaps we make (or don’t make) in life and how we go about moving through time, learning new skills, growing, or adjusting our direction in life.

During my undergrad, one of my teachers told me that the best place to learn was on the job.  He told me that I could study and practice and be prepared, but the real learning would come when I was in the hot-seat on a day-to-day basis, having those demands constantly placed on me.  I never understood just how right he was until I got my first job!

There are certainly times when we need to step back and plan, or even take a little retreat for some time to work things out, but in those occasions when we leap  – whether it’s a deadline or project we’ve made for ourselves, or something handed to us that we must do – is when our wings form.  And one of the coolest things to me is how over time, after jumping again and again, though the leap always feels like a leap, the wings become more like  trusted companions.

So as I think about my students and former students who have just graduated, or moving on to something new, I hope that they will not be afraid to plunge forward and put themselves in a position to accept new challenges and develop their wings.  In the meantime, I will be doing the same, though not on mountain roads.  I’ll leave that to the cyclists!