MUSINGS FROM MIDLIFE
My Stories
Outside Your Thinking Zone
"Please do no feed the fears." Unknown.
Recovery week in my monthly training I have a prescribed day off the bike. Damn. If I can’t ride, why not climb a tree? Makes sense, so I find myself standing on a ledge 15m high harnessed into a rope challenge course.
My 14-year-old daughter has already scrambled across the swinging rope wall quite a few metres wide. Fear is pumping through my veins. I feel frozen. I shout to her that I’m flipping out. She laughs, and yells “just start, if you fall the harness will catch you.”
Yeah great.
The Journey
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you did not stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognised as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.