Wednesday, October 8, 2008

A Leap of Faith

When you throw yourself off a cliff, you have two options: you embrace the idea of meeting whatever lies below, or you fly. Self-described rational thinkers often don't believe they can fly, and refuse to try. For them, leaping is ill advised because depending on how high the cliff, and the character of the terrain, the meeting below could have quite an impact upon them. The dreamers among us leap anyway. We stand at the top of the cliff, throw caution to the wind, and follow it over the edge. We don't know if we can fly, but we open ourselves to the possibility. Why not? Could happen.

I jumped off a cliff this week. I signed myself up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers Month). The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a novel during the month of November. This idea scares me as much as it excites me. I've never written a novel before. In fact, I've never written anything longer than 1200 words, so 50,000 is a daunting leap forward. It's writing more each day than any piece I've ever attempted before. Is this a fool's errand? Maybe. But what's the downside? An incomplete novel? A poorly written novel? Failure can teach more than success, and even a bad novel is better than no novel at all.

That said, I have no intentions of failing. Call it foolishness. Call it over-reaching. Call it hubris, if you will, but here goes nothing. Second star on the right and straight on to morning. I'm planning on flying.

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