There was nothing more freeing than the way the world whizzed past me, whispering sweet-nothings in my ear. “You will be great,” the wind told me. “Believe in yourself,” the sunbeams wrote on my arms.
It’s safe to say that childhood me was more carefree and open to living. As I grew, I closed myself off and drowned myself in my inner monologue. I was not great, I could not be great. I accepted all too gracefully the words that people shared with me. Those who were close to me turned into the greatest of enemies, and I had never felt more alone.
I was afraid to fly, for a long time. I think we all go through a time in our life when we let the bad things keep us down—I’m told that’s the point of gravity. But I also like to think that after a while, we get tired of the earth sticking to our feet. It’s hard to walk when you’ve got all that extra weight, just keeping you from doing what you want to do.
And maybe when we get to that point, we learn to love flying again. We look at the world differently—not mirroring the past, where what could go wrong did go wrong, but as a separate point in our lives. We realize that who we were isn’t who we are, and that the people who hurt us once aren’t around to hurt us again. We learn that life is a risk, and you can either cling to our gravity, holding us down or you can dare to do something…well, a little crazy.
See, this world is something that we don’t have figured out and we never will have completely figured out. It’s all a little more temporary than we like to convince ourselves, and we’re never as safe as we feel. Anything could happen at any moment. This reality that we tend to avoid is extremely terrifying for two reasons. 1) We don’t know what to expect and we can’t prepare for all of the things that could go wrong. 2) There is the opportunity for us to fulfill potential we didn’t even know we have.
I think we’re all meant to fly. We just have to be brave enough to lift our feet off the ground when it matters most. Then, we’ll soar.
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