Dare To….Dare?
Yes. Dare…to dare. Confused? Keep reading…
I apologize for the delay in posting, I’ve been feeling really bad the last several weeks. I’m on a bunch of antibiotics and my body hates antibiotics so I can’t eat, feel dizzy, headaches..all that fun stuff. So, I haven’t really felt like sitting down and writing, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. In all honesty though, and I’m just piecing this together, it just happened to be a really convenient good sounding excuse to procrastinate and not write about a bunch of things that I need to dare myself to do but am too scared to approach.
When the idea for this blog first came to mind it was really cool, really exciting, really ‘this will be good for me’. All these things are still true, but as I’ve gotten to the close of the ‘My Story’ blogs and started to think about the actual ‘dares’ and what to write on next…well…it’s taking on a whole new meaning. I thought this would be easy, I thought the dares would be something challenging, but something I could readily handle. I forgot that growth and progress and pretty much anything worthwhile comes only through struggle and being uncomfortable and pushing yourself farther then you feel you can go.
Dare. What exactly does the word mean? We seem to take words and give them our own personal meaning a lot of the time. I wanted to know what it meant on its own, without my input or my thoughts or preconceived ideas of what it meant.
I thought I knew what it meant, just like I thought I knew what it would be like writing on this blog over the next 12 months, but once I started digging (and blogging) both took on a whole new meaning…
Dare:
1) To have the necessary courage or boldness for something; be bold enough.
2) To have boldness to try; venture; hazard
3) To meet defiantly; face courageously
4) To challenge or provoke a person into a demonstration of courage; defy
5) An act of daring or defiance; challenge
Courage? Boldness? Defiance? Facing courageously?
That’s not really what I signed up for here. That’s not what I was thinking by accepting ‘dare’ as my word for the year. That’s not the type of thing I was planning on writing about on this blog. Challenges? Yes. A few struggles here and there? Well sure, no biggie. That was dare by my definition. I could handle that word. This ‘dare’ thought, defined this way, it seems a little…a little too….daring.
I think we all have things we are willing to deal with, things we know will be tough and a little scary but we know we need to deal with them so we push ourselves into it. But then there is this whole other level. A deeper level of things that need to be dealt with, the real things, the roots of the problems. But those hurt, those are deep, those are the sensitive spots that just thinking about having to face makes us shudder. So we avoid those. We trick ourselves into feeling good about ourselves by addressing the fist level of issues so we never have to get to the second. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else, but I have a feeling it does. I have a feeling that if you think about it for a second it will hit you and hit you hard.
There are tough things that we have to face that we know are in our best interests and so we just suck it up and face them. These things are hard but these are things we can handle, we just don’t like them so we tend to avoid them. Re-read those definitions above.
This isn’t daring.
Daring requires boldness, courage, defiance. Just doing something that you don’t really feel like doing is not ‘daring’.
It’s like someone who really needs to lose weight but they cant push themselves to exercise because its inconvenient, it takes time, it takes effort, it hurts. So instead they eat a salad for lunch instead of a cheeseburger. That’s a step in the right direction right? Yes. That’s something healthy, that’s something that will help them lose weight, that’s a great choice, that’s something that is necessary and needed. But it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. It’s just a small, easy step that makes them FEEL like they are making progress without actually having to put forth any effort. Without having to hurt and struggle.
If you really want to attack the problem, you have to hit it hard, where it counts most.
You have to dare, in the most basic sense of the word. The real definition, not the personalized tweaked definition.
This is where I am right now. Daring myself to dare. To push past that first level and get down to the real things, the tough things, the things that hurt, the things that I actually have to ‘dare’ myself to face. We’ll be looking at the definition in more detail in the coming weeks. What does it mean to dare? To be bold? To be courageous? What do these words really mean?
Dare to ‘dare’. To really dare, by the definition of the word. Think about it.
