Try

Because I am blessed to have a lovely friend (well, a lot of them, actually, but one in particular matters in this context), I got to try something new last week:  kayaking.

 

Trying New Things is both fun and scary.  I’ll deal with the scary bits first.  When we try something we haven’t done before, we might find ourselves worrying that we’ll get hurt.  Or worse, embarrassed.  Or worst of all:  both!  So, for example, I imagined trying to get into the kayak, tipping it and myself over, thwacking my head on the dock, and bleeding profusely.  It didn’t happen.  For one thing, I was with people who had done it before and they showed me how to get in the kayak safely.  My friend made sure that the kayak was steady and secure.  What we learn from this is that learning from experts is useful.  It is especially useful when the experts are kind, clear, and encouraging.

 

We might also worry that we won’t be good at the New Thing.  Guess what?  That’s okay.  We can approach the New Thing with curiosity and ourselves with compassion.  I mean, heck, there’s a whole concept in Buddhism about cultivating Beginner’s Mind—it’s good for us to be inexpert and fresh from time to time.  Personally, I find that it helps to take myself lightly; laughter makes a lot of things easier.

 

A related difficulty might be that the New Thing will be too hard.  Common sense, that rare commodity, comes in handy here.  If we start at the beginning, we’ll probably be all right.  No one starts skiing on the double black diamond runs.  The bunny hill is there for a reason.  Begin with the easy bits, try it out, explore, and don’t panic.  Sure, we might end up sore in new places from doing a different sort of movement, but that’s part of the adventure.

 

Now on to the fun part.  Well, probably.  Sometimes we try a New Thing and we don’t like it.  This is entirely all right.  We do not have to like everything.  We tried lacrosse or ultimate frisbee or synchronized swimming and it was not the right activity for us.  We can cross it off the list and try something else or return to our favorites.

 

The New Thing offers us a different way to see the world.  We use muscles we haven’t used before.  We think about physics (maybe not consciously and maybe not mathematically, but still) in a new context.  Maybe it turns out that our previous experience in baseball applies, or that summer we played all that soccer comes in handy.  Maybe we learn that we’ve been doing a whole lot with our lower body and not so much with the upper body.  Whatever it is, it keeps our brains and our bodies fresher, awake, interested.  Kayaking turned out to be incredibly refreshing, challenging parts of me that hadn’t been working in a while.

 

The world is a big and amazing place.  Go explore!!!