The Space Between

If you want to fly, you have to be willing to jump.

[1056 words, estimated reading time 6-10 mins]

Remember those old Tarzan movies..? If you’re fairly young, or had better things to do on a Saturday morning before Swap Shop or its successors, you probably won’t, so I’ll ask you to use your imaginations. For those more into superheroes, you can substitute ‘Spiderman’ for ‘Tarzan’, ‘web’ for ‘vine’ and add the word ‘urban’ before each occurrence of ‘jungle’ in what follows.

The sequences that always enthralled me as a kid where those of Tarzan swinging swiftly through the jungle, deftly transitioning from one dangling creeper vine to the next. In order for this spectacle to happen though, between letting go of one vine at the apex of the swing and reaching the next were those fleeting moments of unsupported freefall, of unencumbered flight.

Just imagine now how staccato and stilted the ape-lord’s progress would have been if he’d kept legs and arms desperately wrapped around his current vine whilst gingerly grabbing for the next, ensuring he had a firm grip on the new one before finally releasing the last. In fact, there would probably have been a point at which progress stopped altogether because the gap between vines was too large to reach across, and he’d have to try to rebuild his momentum somehow, or climb down, find another tree and start the whole thing again. Or maybe he’d just give up.

Perhaps another, slightly more extreme, example will illustrate my point more vividly – a shipwreck.

Picture the search team sifting through the debris finally finding a survivor clinging to a broken piece of decking, using it to keep themselves afloat and trying in vain to keep themselves out of the freezing water. The rescuers throw a roped ring from their vessel to the survivor, but it falls a few feet short, bobbing on the waves just out of reach.

What do you expect the survivor to do if they want to be rescued..? Ask the search team to reel their rope back in and try harder next time they throw it? Or to let go of their little piece of wreckage for just a few seconds as they throw themselves forward and reach for the one thing that will save them, risking the space between short-term survival and long-term safety.

Over the last few years I’ve seen many of my clients take great leaps over what probably seemed to them to be huge chasms in their lives, letting go of past familiar, and in some cases literally destructive, habits and patterns of thinking, feeling and acting, of situations and, yes, of people, places and relationships sometimes too. Occasionally, the things they’ve let go of have not been bad per se, it’s just that holding on to them would mean a change for something even better can’t happen.

I’ve been inspired by many of them too – one left an increasingly stressful job that was asking her to work in ways she wasn’t comfortable with and having no job to go to, one wrenched himself free of a social circle that was the root of his current addiction, one stood up to a domineering and manipulative manager and meanwhile won a prestigious social award, another flew in the face of all the other men in his family and quit smoking, one conquered over a decade of fear to fly to the US, one exited an abusive marriage and an equally empty affair and entered singledom in their 40s, another quit gambling and saved enough to buy a holiday apartment overseas, and yet another finally realised she could let go of her grief for a lost child whilst still keeping the memories and finally released herself to commit to her current partner... I could go on and on.

The common element to them all as you’ll no doubt have spotted is a willingness to let go BEFORE taking hold of the next vine, to accept their fear and the inevitable period of uncertainty, of unsure footing between what was and what is yet to be. And in so doing, to experience both the exhilaration and the fear of flying free.

So, on to this YEAR’s challenge..! This is a useful way of taking a slightly different view of goals – from the other side of achieving them, and can be used for all sorts of plans and achievements.

Douglas Adams, author of the ‘Hitch Hikers Guide’ series, wrote that the trick to flying is to “throw yourself at the ground and miss.” Even in his slightly odd imagination, this one universal truth still holds – if you want to fly, you have to be willing to jump...

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