49
lifestyle
I took my promise to my mother very seriously. You know, the one where you promise that you wouldn’t jump off a bridge even if all your friends were doing it.
Perhaps that was a hasty promise.
Regardless, I told everyone on the camping trip that I wouldn’t jump. We hiked up to the Bridge to Nowhere, a five mile hike through the San Gabriel Mountains. And the whole hike up I was very confident in my decision not to jump. No one pressured me on the climb up, not even once. They just expressed gratitude for my willingness to come along and watch.
But then I got there.
Watching everyone face their fears and return in a state of pure joy sparked an insatiable curiosity in me.
As I watched my friends, I remembered the book I was reading at the time: “Love is Letting Go of Fear.”
And it clicked.
The opposite of love is not hatred, not even indifference. The opposite of love is fear.
Love is letting go of fear.
If I wanted to love myself, I had to face my biggest fear.
A fear bigger than moving. Bigger than heartbreak. Bigger than spiders, terrorism, or even death. For I have never feared death. What I have feared is jumping.
As I watched the jumpers climb over the wall, I completely trusted that they would not die. I trusted that if I jumped I would not die, no one had ever died on that bridge. So then why was I so afraid to just… jump?
Because jumping meant finally having the courage to get out of my own way. To do the incredible things I had always longed to do, but never believed I would be brave enough to try.
For the reason I had promised myself I would never bungee jump was not because I didn’t want to, but because I was afraid I couldn’t.
I was the last person to pay that day. I was the last person harnessed up.
As I was about to back out, my instructor asked me something that changed everything.
“I can’t talk you into wanting to do this, do you want to do it? If you want to, when I count to five, you’ll jump.”
I examined the flag on the other side of the canyon, the one that we were supposed to jump towards instead of looking down. I examined the wall holding me back. And I looked down at my shaking hands that were clenched nervously to my harness.
In an instant, my thoughts became clear.
I wouldn’t have hiked five miles, paid, harnessed up, and walked to the edge of this bridge if I didn’t want to know what would happen on the other side. I wanted to know. I wanted to jump. And when you want something, the only person who can stop you from getting it is yourself.
The wall of the bridge became the divide between my comfort zone and self-doubt. The wall of fear. The flag on the other side of the canyon transformed into everything I had ever wanted but had been too afraid to believe I could have.
I nodded at my instructor. Climbed right over the fence, and flung my body off a bridge without a second thought.
And I cried the whole way down.
Not tears of fear, but tears of joy.
Tears of love.
Self-love.
In having the courage to dive into my fear, I realized that was where my self-love had lived all along. Just behind the walls I had built inside myself. Walls of fear.
And in climbing over, I climbed over the walls that had stopped me from loving myself.
In facing my greatest fear, in losing myself to it, I found myself.
A love I would never have found if I hadn’t woken up one day, packed up my car, lost half of my belongings and ended up with messy hair and barefoot in a hotel lobby meeting Dave Asprey.
A love I would never have found if I hadn’t packed up my car, harnessed up, and JUMPED.