The Edge.....

From time to time it happens to all of us, to each and every one of us. One minute we're doing just fine and the next we are standing on the edge, standing on the edge of our life, standing and looking but not really able to get our bearings; our sense of direction.

You are afraid to look down, afraid to turn around; as a matter of fact you are just afraid.

And it's broad daylight.

And it's a crystal clear blue sky and you are in a terribly familiar place.

You are in the sum total of all the things you never wanted to feel again.

Your special friend Hopelessness, his twin cousins Misery and Pain, and just for luck they brought along Uncle Past Failures and they are all riding in that broken down truck, hanging on in that pickup truck bed of our lives.

They are waving and shouting, trying to get your attention while you stand at the edge of your life.

Why won't that truck ever run out of gas?

As we try to back up from the edge, we bump against our wall of indecision carefully built brick by brick, rising just above our eyes, so we cannot see the outcome of our life's choices.

So we just never make any.

We let everybody else do for us, eat this, wear that, feel this way and please don't ever go there! Indecision walls are mostly built with used bricks found in other people's lives. They are bricks we have picked up, cleaned off and claimed as our own. Soon we have collected so many of these; we actually hire someone to build our walls, our shelter from life's storms, our safe harbor.

Somehow, though, our safe harbor turns into a hedgerow maze where we are lost and alone while the shadows dance across our hearts. We are lost because we are living in something that we did not create; we are renting our lives, our experiences and our today's.

We are renting when we should be building, be owning. But we think building takes too long and costs too much. And besides, we declare, where is the blueprint to go by?

Have you ever just put your head down on a desk or table and just wished to be someone else, to be somewhere else?

Sure you have!

Do you know why? It's because you are standing on the edge, and you are tired of almost falling and you are weary of almost living. You are really tired of just hanging on.

Do you realize how many calories it takes to just hang on? Not to mention the wear and tear on our bodies and our minds. I am convinced that it takes fewer of life's forces to live than to just "hang on."

We were never going to hang on for very long though; just as soon as this or that happens, we were going to drop to the ground and get on with living.

Sure we were.

So as we enter our tenth or eighteenth or fortieth year of just hanging on, we have lost that vision. That vision of living, because all we know how to do is just hang on.

To hang over the edge.

Never really looking up for help, nor down, for fear we fall; all this time just hanging on, just eight inches off of the ground.

In a movie named The Mission that came out several years ago, a film about the Jesuits in South America, the opening scene depicts a man tied to a wooden cross going over a waterfall. My first question was, "I wonder what he did?" As the movie went I realized that he had come to the edge. But it was not his edge, it was one created for him, but an "edge" nevertheless.

Later in the film, one of the actors is required to do penance for his misdeeds. He is tasked with dragging items from his life inside a giant net behind him. Drag it everywhere. The purpose was to teach him what was important in life, that things do not necessarily make you who you are. I admired his tenacity and endurance during this grueling penance. When he was at last set free from the things in his life, he smiled and then he wept.

And then he hugged those around him.

Not a bad idea.

If you are on that edge, maybe it's time to get off.