Chasm

I want to go, but I don’t go
I want to go, but I don’t go

There’s a window in my head
there’s a door into the air
there’s a hole within my voice and voices
everywhere
are telling me it’s safer here
so I don’t go

All that I have I’ve known wants to bind me as its own
while all I can not see is telling me I could be free

My voices speak and speak and bray and speak
'til I’m so weak I cannot go

so I don’t go

and I don’t speak

But there’s this beating in my chest
a hidden path into the west
and things too good to hear
are being carried to my ear

and I must go, or else be left

When I was a boy, I loved to dive. I’d spend full days at the pool, especially on family vacations. Countless repetitions of the same simple swan dive. I loved its simplicity and elegance, the clean entry into the blue water - each time a chance at perfection. I loved the daring, the flying and the sense of being a good at it. Too, I loved the praise of my mom and my aunt and especially my Grannie, chuckling behind the haze of of her Camel unfiltered.

With each dive, there was a moment of complete commitment, of total power over my fate - when all of my weight had loaded the diving board and there was no turning back. Fear or no fear, my ten-year-old body would be flung into space, and for that brief span I would fly.

Richard Rohr, in Falling Upward writes that, sooner or later, we all come to the stumbling stone… “you will be, you must be led to the edge of your own resources”. I know that now.

None of us grow without stumbling with fear. What I’m learning is that’s the point.

Its face is familiar to the entrepreneur . The intractable “ what ifs ” of building a company. “What if the market turns?… What if the client goes with our rival?… What if we don’t get funded?”. These fears come with the territory of creation. They are simply the stakes of the game.

We think our fear is about failing. And that’s true, as far as it goes. Our company could fail… most do. The market will turn, and it won’t deign to consult us when it does. But these are the fears that dwell at the surface. They rise at the waterline and claim our attention. But in the depths beneath, we carry a far more primal fear.

I think we’re most afraid of showing our Self. I know I am.

Walt Whitman famously writes “I too am not a bit tamed - I too am untranslatable; I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”. Each of us…is singular. Our lives are unrepeatable. Our voice is distinctive completely, and if not heard will never be heard. But if heard… just imagine, what if your voice might live beyond you?

We’ll always exist between fear and courage, always contend with the stumbling stone. And by sounding our singular yawp, we accept that there might be no one listening, like a singer on a dark and empty street.

These are the stakes of claiming your life; not that you’ll fail, or be rejected, or hurt or ignored… but that you will not be true to the Self who lives inside you. This, if we’re honest, is the primal fear.

But not to speak? To stay in hiding? That is the chasm.

Our choice is to step on the board with all of our weight and let ourselves be flung into space. Our reward is to fly free, if only for a few marvelous seconds.

No smiling Grannie, no waiting mom with a popsicle and towel. No guarantees that the world will stop spinning.

Just us, and our self.