No matter the topic, interest, person, place or thing it all shares a common link. That common link is me. Sorry to give away the secret 2 sentences into the very first blog post, but stay with me. Hopefully I can clearly write out what I am thinking so it can be understood.
Everything I know is linked through me.
Everything I know shares a common link. That common link is me. I have been thinking about this for a while now. I will try to explain this as I see it. No matter how I attain knowledge or advice and regardless of the medium that I use (books, teachers, video, family, friends,etc) it is all filtered through me. Since everything I learn is filtered through my ideals and assumptions, this affects everything I know. Now, generally it doesn't effect things such as facts.
Examples: ice is frozen water, fire is hot and requires oxygen to burn, the sun is bigger than earth, etc.
But it DOES affect everything I have not personally experienced and/or something I am afraid/unsure of. The Unknown is a scary concept to me. "Will I keep this job?" "Should I quit?" "Should I go back to school?" Questions like this where my filtered knowledge/advice fail me. Asking other people who I am close to always yielded conflicting answers. Everyone always say if you are lost, go back to school or something. They were unable to help me in a decision, only further cement my fears of the Unknown. So I decided to try a different approach.
Another example of a common thought. I am afraid of heights. I decided I want to go skydiving. A lot of people said I shouldn't do it and/or that they were afraid of doing it. This eventually rubbed off on me. I assumed sky diving was something to be feared, that it will send my body and mind into shock. The problem is that I asked people who never did it or had no intention of doing it. They looked at the situation as: A) Thousands of feet in the air PLUS B) Jumping out of a perfectly good plane = CRAZY!
So I decided to test this idea. My theory is to test if skydiving is scary or is the IDEA of skydiving scary because of a collective fear among my peers, family and coworkers......
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| So I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane :D |
THIS ISN'T SCARY AT ALL!
You might call me crazy but listen... I actually came to 2 conclusions during the jump. The first conclusion is that skydiving isn't that scary. And I realized why it isn't scary. When jumping out the plane, (and even flying up to appropriate height) my ears never popped and my stomach never felt like it was going into my throat. These are 2 common symptoms(for me at least), that caused me to be afraid of heights. Once those 2 things didn't happen, I was able to focus on the EXPERIENCE. Skydiving is an adventure that gives a view of the world that very few people can or will even try to experience.
The second conclusion is that I was actually never afraid of heights. I allowed the collective fear and objections of others to cloud my own judgement without actually attempting to try things first. This got me to thinking back to my initial thought (jobs, education, financial worry, etc) . I wondered once I passed the "Veil of the Unknown," will I actually be in a worse situation or is it merely a disguise to keep me from getting what I want? The way I see it, everyone fights for the comfortable middle (job, house, picket fence,etc) and I realized I don't want to fight for the average middle anymore. No matter how well I exceed, I will still be average. Great risks equal great rewards.
The purpose of this blog is to document my fears and decide what (if anything) I should actually be afraid of. It is also my personal journey in Life to let you see what risks and rewards I may encounter on my journey. This is only the first post, but the information covered in this post will carry through every post in this blog.
Tell me in the comments below what are some misconceptions that you had until you tested them.
NOTE:
I do have a video of my skydive experience. It will be uploaded shortly. Be sure to check back for the YouTube video. You can see the entire experience. Unfortunately, you WILL have to jump to get the best view :-)
So the most important thing that I got from this post is that one must push themselves to go against what even the culture says is taboo ( or crazy in this sense ). In your case, the world says that it is insane jumping out of a perfectly good plane with another man strapped to you with a parachute thousands of feet in the air. You fought against the taboo and jumped out of that plane … strapped to a man with a parachute. You are more of an independent thinker than anything else.
ReplyDeleteLesson here: make everything in your life go through you!!! You got tired of hearing something second hand when you were personally very interested in it so you decided to experience it yourself. Do it yourself. Make it happen through you. Completely elimating the second hand heresay and the ‘Vail of the Unknown’.
I have to admit, there is a lot of taboo that I try to advoid. There are things that I want to do but can’t because of that Veil of the Unknown. To even get personal … well, I’ll make a post about it.
Thanks for the inspiration … once again.