The 10 Days of Paramore – Careful

Day Four 

First off, I love strategies. Rules. Lists. The calculated order of certain certainties. Problem is, this careful, methodical way of living can backfire and build a bubble around your life. Every time I took the careful way out, I kept myself from growing into a stronger, more mature person, and it certainly did not help me become any braver. The plain and ugly truth is that my life for the first 25 years or so was kind of ordinary (boring). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. What is it that they say? For everything in life there is a season?

This week I took advantage of a friend’s suggestion to run away from home for a while, to sin city of all places. Guess what though – even in this half-assed attempt to be spontaneous, I still managed to come up with a list of to-dos – watch the water / light fountain show thing outside the Bellagio. Get a tattoo. Have some laughs with a couple of good friends. Watch a show. Drink. Come back with some memories. Sky jump off the stratosphere. I am proud to say that I did five out of the seven things on this list (with the exception being the first two items).

Now I don’t know about you, but I get vertigo walking too close to the railing on the second floor of a mall, so the idea of jumping off a building attached to a few wires seemed just a tad bit out of the realm of possibility. But I guess you just get to a point, when you get really tired of being scared ALL the time. So there I was, out on the ledge over a hundred floors up, bargaining with the guy in charge of all the safety checks to push me off, because let me tell ya – the really scary thing about jumping isn’t the fall. It’s that first step -that moment of conscious decision when you let go and step into oblivion. The falling part is easy. You scream bloody murder and gravity takes care of the rest. But that first step is all you. There’s a line in today’s Paramore song, which goes, “you can’t be too careful anymore, when all that is waiting for you won’t come any closer…you’ve got to reach a little more”. Stepping off that ledge made me feel something I’ve never felt before – the hope in uncertainty. It was a great feeling. I felt like Ethan Hawke in the movie Gattaca, when he said “it was the moment that made everything else possible”. Being careful, following rules and expectations = overrated. Knowing that you still have the ability to surprise yourself = priceless.