Patience On A Diving Board
you can think all you want. plan, and re-plan. make space for contingencies. breathe in and out—slowly—and breathe again for the thousand-and-one’th time. walk through each step in your mind, and vividly walk through it again. flex each muscle, anticipating tandem and sequence. talk to each follicle on your skin, and repeatedly fail to soothe the heart palpitating behind your tongue. you can be patient, wail, or aggressively resist. you can concoct majestic rhetorics about why you oughtn’t be there in the first place. and even vehemently state them so. but when push comes to shove, jumping into a pool for the first time requires an absolute abandon of all things sane and mindful. it is one of the most impressionably impulsive and terrifying acts that you’re ever likely to perform, by virtue of how early you encounter it and by how malleable you are when you do.
a diving board is the crumbling ground for rationale. that you allowed yourself to be brought there is, in itself, a horrifying mistake. but, having ventured down the rabbit hole, a diving board is also the single-most fantastic (and yet, forgiving) point-of-no-return you’re likely to meet. it’s clearly foolish to go back dry, so there’s nearly only one way forward: one that points straight down. patience has no place on a diving board. stupidity, does. and if you can sell yourself a story stupid enough, you’ll do it with a smile on your face.