Most recently, I encountered this question in a TED talk. (Yes, yessss, I post links to way too many TED talks . . . It keeps me feeling like I'm part of a learning community but somehow magically from my couch. There are worse addictions . . . )
What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?
I'd write. I'd work for NASA mission control (A secret dream I'm just admitting now). I'd learn how to blow glass (no jokes, please) and I'd make a living by some combination of these disparate but thrilling skills. I'd jump out of a plane and dance and sing and take photographs and hike and climb and swim races. I would master the making of chocolate mousse.
I think that there's a lot of things we all would do if we knew we couldn't fail - flying and making really complicated stuff comes to mind. The question I've been wondering about is: what would we do if we HAD to? What would we do if our survival depended on it? What would we do even if success was unlikely because doing it was so important, or not doing it was reckless and wrong?
Asking ourselves what we would do if we didn't fear or face limitations is a worthy question. It helps us identify the limitations we assume, the weights we agree to when we rule things out. In turn, that leads us to consider if the limitations outweigh the passion we have, or if they are even real guard rails or just imagined ones. It helps us honestly own what we desire to dedicate ourselves to. It makes us speak what most makes our hearts sing.
So, I don't mean to sound jaded or removed from the idea of "what could we all achieve and contribute if we didn't have to pay bills and be grown ups." I watched Sesame Street and listened to "Free to Be" just as much as the next kiddo. I think dreams and believing in them are good and not to be squashed.
But, in the world where all of our dreams and plans aren't as we imagined them, sometimes it pays to ask, "What would I do even if there was no assured pay off?"
I refer to this as the Aron Ralston Problem.
Often, when people refer to Ralston, it's him having been trapped in the Blue John Canyon in Moab for 127 hours before freeing himself by severing his arm with a multi-tool. I watched, transfixed, as he gave interviews in 2003 and 2004. I read the book in 2005. I saw the movie in 2011. So, I'm a bit of a Ralston nerd, as it were. It's not the gore or the outdoorsy-ness. (Though, those things are cool, to be sure.) For me, I'm captivated by how he worked through things, processed, and figured out his options as the full weight of what he was dealing with settled on him. I mean that literally as well as figuratively since he was trapped by an 800lb boulder that suddenly moved as he was descending into a slot canyon and settled directly on his arm, pinning him between the boulder and the wall. He had planned to bike in the morning and hike in the afternoon, so he had only a day-trip's worth of water and food with him. What occurred to him first was that he needed to ration that, and that the water would be the bigger of the two problems. Having not been clear on his hiking plans with anyone, he realized next that even if anyone started looking for him, they would be looking too late, and not know where to search. I'm amazed that he survived long enough to have the choice to amputate because if it had been me I might have panicked and done things to make a terrible situation worse. Even if I hadn't, would I have been wise and focused enough to ration my food and water, recycle my own urine, use the rope and climbing equipment I had to allow my legs to rest and myself to sleep, and kept warm for five days? Of course we all want to say yes, but in reality, would I have been able to come up with all of those strategies while staring at the boulder trapping me and possibly causing my death? I don't know.
Somewhere on day two or three, Aron considered amputation but he also found it was very hard to use the knife/multi-tool he had to . . . uhhhh . .. get in there. He hadn't packed for technical climbing or camping so he had a fairly simple and dull multi-tool. Later he realized that although the boulder trapped his arm, it also provided the leverage he could use to break his bones. This meant he could cut through flesh and nerves (soft-tissue), but not have to cut through anything dense and hard. The boulder that could have ended his life became the very means to save himself. That boulder, an incredible will to live, and a dull multi-tool.
And one other thing: the ability to do what was in front of him, without any certainty that it would work.
What I always say when I reference Ralston is this: it's not that cutting off his arm meant he would survive. What's incredible is that by amputating his arm MAYBE he would live long enough to find water and people. He cut off his arm knowing there was NOT enough time to make it back to his car before he bled out and only hoping that he would find water and help soon enough.
Ralston knew he didn't have the water, food, or strength to last another night at the bottom of that canyon. If he had stayed he would have certainly died. But he made a choice that most of us cannot fathom without any assurance that it would mean that he would live. That's what blows my mind.
It's perhaps difficult to imagine our lives without limitations of time, money, training, responsibility. That's what makes the question of what would we do if we knew we couldn't fail an interesting mental exercise. I think it is harder still to imagine ourselves facing doing something where the probability of success is against us. What would be so important that we would do it anyway? Would we have the will to do something really hard, really painful, really unimaginably against our instinct if we knew it might-not-probably-would-not work?
When we watch Ralston interviews, or read about him, or (for some, best of all) watch James Franco on 127 hours, what we wonder, what I wonder, is Could I do what he did if I had to?
Stick a pin in that for a minute and let me ask this instead: how many things do we do with no persuasive evidence that it will work?
This isn't even me writing more about faith or belief. It's about trusting ourselves to go out and do things in the world (which, ok, for many people is wrapped integrally around faith and trust. Yes.) In college philosophy we examined the idea that we actually don't KNOW that the sun will rise tomorrow. It has risen every day SO FAR. But even that overwhelming evidence doesn't guarantee that there wouldn't be an event that could stop the sun from rising tomorrow. We believe it will because it's easier to go on the evidence of what has happened and because so much depends on it. But what about the things we do where we don't have overwhelming personal data to shore up our actions or beliefs?
I know several people who have gone skydiving, but one in particular who did it BECAUSE she was afraid of heights and wanted to push the envelope . . . right out the door of the plane, as it were. Who are these people who step out the doors of planes?! As human beings, knowing the statistics of sky-diving safety and safe jumps has got to be intellectually puny compared to the will to actually JUMP when terror has overtaken rational thought. But people do it.
All evidence from my life of . . . ahem . . . more than 30 years suggested that getting on a bike was a bad idea. Let's really think about biking for a sec: when I look at it rationally, ohmigoodness. It's aluminium tubing connected to two wheels that I'm supposed to balance on while speeding through the open air with moving traffic and/or other bikes around me? Yeah, that seems like a good idea! Moreover, I'd had bad experiences on bikes. Why would I ever get on a bike and ride dirt and single-track trails. And yet, that's just what I'm doing . . . for several hours a week. Also in the realm of sports, this may not be news to any of you, but most people don't like getting hit in the face. But I BEGGED my Sensei to help me come up with an individualized plan to get me from the beginning belt curriculum in American Freestyle karate to the intermediate curriculum and to prepare me for sparring. I knew at the time there were no other women sparring in the dojo and that this would mean getting hit by men who were stronger, faster, and more advanced than me. Life-evidence would suggest that getting hit isn't fun, but I found some way to ignore that and suited up to get kicked and punched. Um, a lot.
We do other things, every day, that seem so hard if we really think about them. Why would we get up in front of a room of people and give a presentation? What imperative could be so strong as to motivate us to move past our natural fear of being vulnerable to do that? Or perform on stage? Why would we ask that person out knowing that there's just as good a chance that they'll say no as yes? Why would we move away from the people we know and love and make a new life somewhere else? As adults, I can tell you, this is very hard emotional work and takes weeks and months to settle out to where we can see if we landed in the right place with the right people. I did this four years ago, and a friend recently described her experience of trying to re-settle herself and meet people as being, "tired out by the small steady bits of courage it requires . . . " That was my experience for months. I mean, really? Why would we do these things?
And yet, we do. We run marathons and cliff dive and go to new countries. We get pregnant and labor for over 24 hours, we have major surgeries and move far away and give giant presentations and suit up to jump out of planes or get beat up by someone bigger than us. We do things that, out of context, seem INSANE.
I discussed with my therapist yesterday a time, at age 17, where I seriously sought ways to leave home. I was persuaded otherwise, and there was a brief reprieve, but I was prepared, that night, to pack a suitcase and go live elsewhere given some things that were just untenable at that point. Less than a year later I found myself completely responsible for the cost of my college education. At 18, I didn't know how to come up with $7-$10,000 of "family contribution" to college tuition. I'm not sure that 18 year olds are supposed to know how to do this. And each year I would tell the staff I worked with that I couldn't guarantee that I would manage to do it again, and that if they wanted to be safe, they should hire to replace me. And I meant it. I never knew, for sure, where all of that money was going to come from every year. But every year I did it, and thusly I graduated (without pause) in four years having constructed a complicated and rigorous concentration of studies (read: self-designed major), a network of amazing friends, colleagues, and mentors, and knitting together ten or twelve different things I did for money in order to afford life and tuition for that time.
So, maybe the question isn't, "could we do the thing which seems really scary and impossible if we HAD to?" but instead, "how do we know what we can do until we do it?"
I think the answer is, we don't. We can't imagine amputating our own arm, cutting through nerve with what amounts to a pocket knife (that we would struggle to use to trim a stray thread on our shirt), breaking our own bones, and hiking out of a canyon with no reason to believe that we would find help in time. But we also probably can't imagine ourselves doing a lot of things we end up doing until we find ourselves on the precipice of doing them. Although hindsight is 20/20, things don't always make sense looking up ahead too far. Focus in too closely and a pebble can look like a boulder. Step back and it is a minor speck on the road. We can't see the whole picture if all we're focusing on is the point at which we cut through our own flesh and endure pain. We can't see all the things that brought us to that moment, we can't appreciate being between a rock and a hard place and using those surfaces to squeeze ourselves out into what awaits us next.
So, I'll say it again - how do we know what we can do until we do it? In this way, the question of "what would we do if we knew we could not fail" takes on the same flavor. Both kinds of questions lead us to admit that we are more powerful than we acknowledge when we're just going day to do brushing our teeth and making coffee and deciding between chicken or turkey. Much more powerful.
Sometimes at those moments, it's important to acknowledge that failure is possible, and then move past that moment. Ralston describes knowing that he would die someday, maybe even (probably even) THAT day, but choosing that he wouldn't die standing in his grave in that canyon. He wanted, at least, to surmount that. He wanted, at least, to have done what he could to survive past that boulder or be somewhere where his body could be found. He acknowledged that he might not make it to medical attention, and then moved past it and did it anyways. And, when I'm headed down a really big hill on the bike I'm typically saying, out loud (Like a crazy idiot), "I might fall. That's ok. I've fallen before. Ok, this is really steep. I'm doing it. Here comes that tricky turn." Ahhhhhhh.
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| Game face ON! |
Until I got to the bottom of that hill without falling, I couldn't imagine doing it. So, if I based the decision to move forward on what I could see, what had already happened, what I knew, past performance (which involved falling down that hill, getting up and then falling down again) the evidence suggested I should be thinking, NO WAY JOSE! But walking my bike down that hill without trying was unacceptable to me. What that left was accepting that I might fall. That I probably will fall on that hill again (it's a toughy) but that heading down it is better than accepting defeat. Game face on is better than pulling up the covers, trapped by the proverbial boulder.
All of this is to say, it is hard to keep applying with no evidence so far that it is going somewhere. My person said recently that this was most definitely an exercise in faith, which is interesting since he is probably a more spiritual person than I am and I am probably the more religious of us two. It requires faith, yes, but also the understanding while I don't have any data that my job search is leading somewhere, not doing it assures a continuation of things I'm not fond of. If it means thinking about how to take on a part or full time job that is less than stellar (probably admin. Siiiigh) in the next month or so and then running around to babysit, tutor, and do other part time work to "make up the difference" that is what it means. But. Butbutbut at 17 and 18 I had no idea how to support myself and pay an adult amount of tuition each year. And I did that. At 24 I did't know how to spar, and I let big men hit me in the face as a way to learn. At 28 I had no earthly clue what I would do as I was leaving grad school, but within a week of the semester being over, I had a job. Ralston describes the "miracle" of beginning to lose strength from the blood loss and no longer having adrenaline pulling him down the path. Of reaching the point where he'd have to climb up and out and just then encountering the rescue helicopter. But when he hacked off his limb, there was no way to know that would happen that way.
Miracles for me tend to be smaller events, and not always as seamless in timing as I might like. I am a bit of an obsessive project manager, after all, and I do like to line things up perfectly. I can't wait for a helicopter to swoop in without doing the work to get on the path, is what I'm saying. It might not happen as I wish it would, but taking a paycheck-job, or making plans other than the perfect next thing is a chance to remind myself that I have done hard things before. That I have made it down scary and steep roads and will again. I'm really not expecting a last-minute movie ending or to be saved, nor for things to be as dramatic as all that, just to keep moving forward and look back some day and say, "I had no idea I could do that . . . until I did."
