Saturday, January 16, 2016

The Magic of Jumping


A friend got me thinking the other day. He told me what it was like for him when he jumped out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. When he got done, I asked him what the scariest part of it was. He said, "Well, jumping."

The plummeting through the air at breakneck speed toward earth wasn't as scary as jumping out the door.

Think of all the ways you can move. Walk, run, crawl, stroll, sprint, etc. But how does nature move?

Nature moves in jumps. "Quantum leaps" to be specific. When the time is right the movement is not by drifting, blending, plodding or easing into; it's by jumping.

Even the kids' game of Leap Frog. That's where the term leapfrogging comes from. Here's the dictionary definition from infoplease.com
an advance from one place, position, or situation to another without progressing through all or any of the places or stages in between
Think about it. You can move yourself from place to place in a host of ways, but sometimes (imagine going from one rooftop to another) you just have to jump.

But the thing is you can jump even when you don't have to. I heard a preacher once talking about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane as he agonized before the crucifixion. Jesus talked about drinking the cup of what awaited him (the crucifixion). The preacher generalized from there telling us, 'When you have something difficult to do, when you have a bitter cup to drink, don't sip it. Drink it straight down.'

Another way of saying: jump.

Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote in his book Markings:
You told yourself you would accept the decision of fate. But you lost your nerve when you discovered what this would require of you: then you realized how attached you still were to the world which has made you what you were, but which you would now have to leave behind. It felt like an amputation, a "little death," and you even listened to those voices which insinuated that you were deceiving yourself out of ambition. You will have to give up everything. Why, then, weep at this little death? Take it to you—quickly—with a smile die this death, and become free to go further.
Isn't that what it's like (a "little death") when you're facing something terrible. I mean, you really don't want to go through it at all. But you have to, so like he said, 'take it to you—quickly.' In other words, jump.

Jumping is where the magic is. It's nature's way. It's our way. Jumping minimizes suffering. It moves you down the road faster.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to the aim.
Make it easy on yourself. Get ahead faster. Yes, jumping is hard, but once you do, the rest is easy and the benefits are great.







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