How would you feel just walking your own path. Knowing there are people walking in a different lane. Still close enough to help you, support you and walk with you.
How would you feel if you walked your own path without hesitation or doubts? Fierce and with a confident walk. What would happen to you if you did? Would you be able to make your dreams come true?
My friend Karlien posed these questions recently, and they might as well have been directed right at me - I couldn't get them out of my head.
'Without hesitation or doubts' is what really speaks to me. Because to neither hesitate nor doubt sits at the highest burning curve of the possible, barely a shade below the point at which Icarus found he was just a little too close to the sun.
Of course one of the morals often taken from the Icarus story is that we shouldn't aspire too highly; that overweening ambition exacts a terrible price.
But if our ambition is simply to know our path and to walk it boldly - what then?
I can pinpoint times in my life when doubt and hesitation were crippling forces, and I was stuck; I couldn't go anywhere. And then at other times, secure and confident and certain of myself, I've stepped out - only to have half a dozen people rush to advise me to stay in line. 'Be careful how you come across,' they say. 'People will think you're arrogant. Don't let it go to your head.'
If I had a tenner for every piece of unsought for advice that sought to reduce me from who and what I really am, down into something more appeasing - well, I'd have taken that dream trip to New Zealand already!
To go back to Icarus, the part of the story that sometimes gets forgotten is that Icarus was also advised not to fly too low. There were dangers there, too.
All these analogies fall down at some point and this isn't a blog about finding the middle ground, but it's a helpful illustration nonetheless. Icarus was trying to effect an escape; complacency and overconfidence were both dangers to his plan. Isn't that so often where we find ourselves in life, struggling between over- and under-doing it? Or is it just me? And what do I want to escape? Insignificance; uncertainty; the feeling that I am not the 'me' I am made to be.
So we set our sights again on the path, and honestly, I don't think I can always do it without hesitation or doubts. But those are weakening, and I have my friends around me. It's a good start.
Photo by Trevor Brown on Unsplash