Balance Beam

Sometimes life is a balance beam. It's like the one you had as a kid in gym class. You know what I speak of: the benches along the wall that the teacher had you turn upside down and walk along during PE Period. You learned after a bit of work, to walk the beam doing various gymnastic maneuvers without falling off too many times, until you got it right. It was fun. It wasn't high enough at the beginning to worry about,  but as the teacher raised the equipment, the challenge became greater, and in spite of the nice thick blue mats below, your fears increased with the height of the beam. You had to overcome your anxiety of falling in order to maintain your balance. It was a kind of connection war between your mental and physical forces. There are many times, now, in daily adult life, when you feel that you are on that balance beam and even though you know the fall can hurt, you want to take a chance anyway. It could be taking on a huge venture, a relationship or some sort of  project. You know that if you fail, everything will seem to be lost, but you decide to consider your chances regardless of the risk. Before you do, however, you measure the dangers of failure, against your need to take on the challenge that could be important to your future contentment with who and what you are. You have only one life and you don't want to mess up. At least not too much. After thinking it over, you either go for it, or not, but you do so with a grounding, nay, grinding, assessment. If you take on the risk you could be hugely rewarded. If you don't attempt the risk to tread the thin beam, you could regret it for the rest of your life. You'd never know if you might have been successful or not. It is therefore, you think, a matter of trying the project on or visualizing your walk along the edge. To do this, level headed folk, take a realistic approach. Emotions have to be set aside in order to deal with the realities. Out comes the paper and pencil or a run to your "guru" whomever or whatever that is. You fold your "paper" in half and write down, on one side, the pros and on the other side, the  cons, of this decision. You give each side the value and weight it deserves, but only in actual, solid  terms. Emotions and the possible opinions of others, though considered, must be set aside. It is your life and your move. You spend a lot of time at this point. After this, comes the scary part. You have to take the step. You tell yourself that you have given it thought and that if you don't do it, you will never have another "kick at the can". What happens next, becomes part of your history, and hopefully success, and if it doesn't, you can tell yourself that you at least gave it a fair trial. Good luck, because sometimes, no matter how much you rationalize, that is all there is.