“The Heartbeat: Sometimes, you need to scare the sh*t out of yourself.”
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I woke up at 5:30 a.m. yesterday, filled up a travel mug of coffee, packed my wetsuit and new fins, and met my partner to do an open-water swim.
I’m a fairly strong swimmer.
I’ve always lived near bodies of water.
And, I surf.
Yet as I started to paddle, I began to feel fear filling my chest.
It became difficult to breathe.
I spent an entire 20 weeks in my mid-20s learning how to perfect every single swim stroke — freestyle, breaststroke, butterfly, backstroke — so I know how to swim.
Yet not having any visibility, both under the water and on the surface due to the fog surrounding me, caused me to panic.
The strength I knew in my body rivaled the weakness in my mind.
I kept on swimming. I turned on to my back to alleviate my anxiety. I smiled when my partner and his colleague checked in with me, each of them 10 yards away to either side of me.
I made it to the buoy.
Then, I started heading back, packs of seagulls swimming above us.
By the time I got onto the shore, my balance was a bit off from navigating the waves.
“How was it?” my partner asked me.
I looked at him.
“I was actually kind of terrified,” I told him.
“Really?” he asked. He walked over to me and wrapped his arms around me. “I should’ve checked in on you more.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m fine. It was good for me.”
Why do you need to scare the sh*t out of yourself?
Because the quality of your life could depend on it.
Time researchers show that having a life with a lot of novelty, change, and deep emotions will imprint more deeply in your memory.
Why do you want this?
It means that when you reflect upon your last day, week, month — or even your entire life — you will feel like time is subjectively longer no matter how much time it actually took.
Tim Urban, creator of the Wait But Why blog, sells a calendar on his site where you can literally cross off your week-by-week based on a 90-year lifetime.
He wrote an article in The New York Times and said:
That’s one box for every week of a 90-year life. It often feels like we have countless weeks ahead of us. But actually, it’s just a few thousand — a small-enough number to fit neatly in a single image.
Once you visualize the human life span, it becomes clear that so many parts of life we think of as “countless” are in fact quite countable.
These two delusions — that we have countless time ahead of us and that we can’t change our course — are a recipe for complacency.
When you see your life laid out like this, where you can cross off the time you’ve lived versus the potential time you have left, you may start to get into what he calls “Depressing Math.”
Here’s the good news!
The good news about being human is that we have choices. We can re-prioritize and influence our outcomes by making different decisions.
We underestimate future possibilities for the same reason we overestimate the time we have left with those we love: our intuition is not very imaginative. It’s a human instinct to believe the life we’re used to is how things will always be, both the good parts and the bad.
We think a lot about those black lines: the roads not taken, the opportunities missed, the ones that got away. But most of us greatly underestimate the size of the lush green tree of possibilities that lie ahead of us.
I’m grateful I paddled out. I’ll do it again. I’ll get stronger.
I’ll feel good crossing off the days, weeks, and months because I’m aiming to exist in that lush green tree of possibilities.
If you’ve been sitting on the fence about doing something your heart truly desires, leaping into your purpose, or standing up for what you believe in, perhaps seeing it laid out in these visuals is a helpful way to do something that freaks you out in the best of ways. ♡
Love,
Judy
P.S. This story was inspired by a recent RadioLab podcast episode I listened to. I highly recommend The New York Times article by Tim Urban too, to see a visual representation of how much time you have with those you love.
Let’s chat.
The story you tell yourself is how you create greater mental + emotional health, and create a life you love.
If you’re ready to take a leap, let’s chat.
