{"id":1088,"date":"2012-06-27T10:36:21","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T15:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/?p=1088"},"modified":"2012-06-27T10:36:21","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T15:36:21","slug":"jumping-off-cliffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/?p=1088","title":{"rendered":"Jumping Off Cliffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.\u201d\u00a0 – Kurt Vonnegut<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I got a quick lesson in driving tight winding Rocky Mountain roads a couple days ago on our way to Aspen when my husband Dave got terribly sick and couldn\u2019t drive anymore.\u00a0 Needless to say, with Dave, Andreas, and his nanny Emily in the car, I wasn\u2019t about to take any chances.\u00a0 Honestly, I was happy to be driving and just went along slowly, ignoring the cyclist (as in a person pedaling a non-motor vehicle!) tailgating me.\u00a0 I figured the 10 MPH warning signs on the narrow hairpin turns (with no guardrail) were there for a reason.\u00a0 Needless to say, I did NOT go off any cliffs on this occasion.<\/p>\n

Life for me has always, to some extent, felt like a string of unexpected events and saying \u201cOK, here we go!\u201d layered over a constant slow and winding path of preparation and just moving through life.\u00a0 It usually goes like this: I\u2019m going along, doing what I think I should be doing. Then, in Marcia Brady\u2019s immortal words, \u201csomething suddenly comes up\u201d that demands attention and a response.\u00a0 Usually it\u2019s something challenging that I was NOT planning on.\u00a0 Sometimes these events alter the course of my original plan, but more often, they end up being bursts of activity and learning that become woven into the fabric of what I was already doing.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, it is during this time when decisions are usually the easiest to make because you either have no choice, or you have limited time to make a choice.\u00a0 You take a leap of faith and say \u201cyes\u201d to something, and figure it out along the way.\u00a0 Though I am no jazz musician, I imagine improvisation feels a bit like this.\u00a0 You have a certain set of skills – a language in your ears and fingers – and you employ whatever seems to work at the moment, stretching and plunging forward sometimes, or laying back as needed.\u00a0 And practicing this jumping and improvising over and over again is what makes you better at it.<\/p>\n

The above quote by Kurt Vonnegut rang true to me on so many levels when I came across it a few weeks ago.\u00a0 It was in the afterward of a book that my very literary friend Katie recommended, \u201cLet the Great World Spin\u201d by Colum McCann.\u00a0 (I highly recommend it by the way!) The words struck me because these days, I feel like every hour of every day I\u2019m developing my mom wings after receiving the precious gift of Andreas into my life.\u00a0 But it also got me thinking also about all<\/em> the leaps we make (or don\u2019t make) in life and how we go about moving through time, learning new skills, growing, or adjusting our direction in life.<\/p>\n

During my undergrad, one of my teachers told me that the best place to learn was on the job.\u00a0 He told me that I could study and practice and be prepared, but the real learning would come when I was in the hot-seat on a day-to-day basis, having those demands constantly placed on me.\u00a0 I never understood just how right he was until I got my first job!<\/p>\n

There are certainly times when we need to step back and plan, or even take a little retreat for some time to work things out, but in those occasions when we leap\u00a0 – whether it\u2019s a deadline or project we\u2019ve made for ourselves, or something handed to us that we must do – is when our wings form.\u00a0 And one of the coolest things to me is how over time, after jumping again and again, though the leap always feels like a leap, the wings become more like\u00a0 trusted companions.<\/p>\n

So as I think about my students and former students who have just graduated, or moving on to something new, I hope that they will not be afraid to plunge forward and put themselves in a position to accept new challenges and develop their wings.\u00a0 In the meantime, I will be doing the same, though not on mountain roads.\u00a0 I\u2019ll leave that to the cyclists!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.\u201d\u00a0 – Kurt Vonnegut I got a quick lesson in driving tight winding Rocky Mountain roads a couple days ago on our way to Aspen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelashornstudio.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}