Free Fall

Today was an awesome day.
Sorry, make that A-W-E-S-O-M-E!

The Ropes Course at Leadership Lubbock has long been the day to fear because of all of its challenges. I knew some of what I was in for having completed a course over a decade ago. I was ready for the physical and mental challenges. I was not prepared for the emotional ones at all.

Sitting down to write about it all seems impossible. I've made a good start but emotions are overflowing one another to the point of putting them down on paper doesn't make sense. That's a first for me.

Briefly, the day was about leadership through team building. With today's lessons as confirmation, everything I've been taught since kindergarten about meeting challenges and being successful needs to be scrapped. I've suspected it for while, learning from a co-worker who lives the team concept.

The biggest challenge of the course for most people was climping up and jumping from the top of a telephone pole to grab a trapeze bar hanging in mid-air ten feet away. I felt excited to be harnessed up and hooked to a belay line. I felt like I couldn't climb up the 55ft pole fast enough. My jump partner waited at the top after his climb to the 1ft x 2ft plank we were to jump from. I vividly remember standing up on top of the plank and looking around the horizon. It was very pretty in the overcast of clouds. A cooling breeze calmed me. It was easy. Too easy. I was too calm.

Then it hit me. Jumping from that pole was one of the easiest things I have ever challenged myself to do. To have a whole team at my back on belay, jumping to essentially fall to the ground was not difficult at all. Difficult is the way I've been doing things for years, alone.

Months ago I realized I need to apply this thinking to my whole life. I'm reeling from dozens of lessons learned today but I've been in free fall long enough. That's what made jumping off the pole a breeze.