The joy on the other side

For the most part, I've felt pretty brave at 34. Today I marked the halfway through 34 point, so I stopped to reflect a little on this. I've been reading a lot of Anne Lamott lately, both her books and her Salon archives online, and one paragraph really stayed with me.

I think that even though I've felt pretty brave -- being on my own after four years of couplehood, getting my bike and learning to ride it, doing the triathlons -- I'm still fearful of some things. Of taking some steps.

The backstory of this passage is that Anne Lamott's dog Sadie had been attacked by a pit bull on a walk and Anne was nervous about going back out on walks after that.

So I took Sadie for a walk, right past the house where the pit bull lives. What else was I going to do -- get her a treadmill? No, she's a tracker. She lives to walk along sniffing things. And, anyway, you just can't stay holed up. You've only got this one mongrel life, and you don't want to spend it hiding indoors; pretty soon the menace is everywhere and you're left worrying about what's going to rise up out of the basement. You have to wear down the fear. You can't kite yourself up over the places you wish did not exist. You have to suit up, show up, move on through. The good news is that the joy is on the other side of the dark stretch of sidewalk. Also, you can ask someone to walk along with you, someone or something you trust. So I decided to be that person for Sadie and help her take back her joy in the street.

I read that, stopped, and read it again. And then again. And I let the words really sink in.

The thing about Anne Lamott is that she is not just that person for Sadie. She has also, many times, been that person for me. Like now. Again.

This time, she's reminding me that we can't hide from what we're afraid of. And that is something that it never hurts to hear. No matter what it is that we're hiding from, no matter what we are fearing at any given time of our lives -- taking charge of our health, going for what seems like an impossible dream, putting ourselves out there in any number of ways, creativity-wise or relationship-wise or whatever -- we just have to face them -- our problems, our hang-ups, our fears. Whatever is stalling us on whatever path we're trying to take.

As Mother Superior tells Maria in The Sound of Music, "Maria, these walls were not meant to shut out problems. You have to face them. You have to live the life you were born to live." And then Maria later tells Liesl, "You can't use school to escape your problems, you have to face them!" Maria was hiding behind the convent walls, Liesl was hiding behind school, we all hide behind something. I just want to climb my own walls. Don't you want to climb yours?

I told a wise friend recently about something that was making me feel really jittery, frazzled, and self-doubting and wondered if that was a sign I should not do it or if those feelings are just part of Going Through It. As I thought she might, she said she suspected that underneath those feelings, "Some very interesting treasures are buried." Which is pretty much exactly what Anne Lamott was saying about the joy on the other side of the dark stretch of the sidewalk that we just have to walk down sometimes whether we want to or not.