The Leap of Faith

Last week was my daughter E’s last week of  day of camp. As it came to an end, were talking about all the adventures she had at camp.  In the last eight weeks she:

Built a birdhouse
Made a ceramic bowl
Acted (beautifully) in two plays
Made a new friend but kept her best friend close
Discovered a new beach, a new zoo, a new amusement park

Of all E’s accomplishments, it’s the activity called adventure challenge that I marvel at the most. It’s an incredible thing, really. It’s a structure that goes up about 30 feet in the air.  Campers are in a harness, the way you are during rock climbing. There are different courses you can climb - you can go straight up a pole,  go straight up a pole then walk on a wire between two poles, or climb straight up the pole and traverse these series of circles that swing in the air.

The part of adventure challenge that E loves the most is called the leap of faith, pictured above. The leap of faith requires you to climb a pole about thirty feet up, navigate yourself on to this wooden plank, then, leap off into the air - fly - and try to strike the ball that hangs nearby.

The leap of faith.

E’s summer and my summer held very different activities. While she was having a range of new adventures, my summer was filled with the same people, the same work, the same commute. Very different, yet the one place where our summers collided was in making a leap of faith.

My leap of faith came from finally trusting my own intuition. I realized how often it was that I had the answers, knew the solution, could see the way forward. And how often it was that I talked myself out of those answers.

I know that a lot of us do that. We listen to the voice that delivers a different version of the truth than our intuition. That’s the voice that’s tells us what we should be doing, the voice of that tells us what is “right” or what we “deserve.”

This summer, I finally stopped listening to those voices and started to trust my intuition in earnest. When I did that, when I listened to my gut instead of my mind, so much goodness got revealed to me.  My writing flows. I say out loud what I believe to be true. I make choices that end up being the best choices. When I listen to myself, I know what foods to eat, what time it its without looking, that the person I met will be my friend forever.  There are times when it’s a struggle, but I am living into a place that tells me that when my intuition is talking,  it’s her voice that should be listened to above all.

So at the age of 49 and half, I took that leap of faith. I told the voice of reason, the voice of history, the voice of others to stand back, and I just trusted that what I was feeling was the way forward.

Like E’s leap of faith, it took a bit of courage, a lot of preparation, and a deep sense of trust. But when I really listen to the voice inside, I too can fly.