Musings

I’ve regretted the coaster rides on which I never opened my eyes and wondered what views I’ve missed. But I’ve never regretted the ride of my life. Alan Weiss

When I was a kid, I was scared out of my mind by roller coasters, and those were the days when you could still go to Palisades Park in northern New Jersey or Coney Island in New York. The structures looked rickety, they made a frightening racket, people on them were always screaming, and the ride (with eyes closed tightly all the way) was over in just 60 seconds. (Lord Chesterfield once observed about sex: "The expense is damnable, the position ridiculous, and the pleasure momentary.")

Then, down the Jersey shore one day, I thought I heard something ominous on the way up the first Mt. Kilimanjaro-type hill and opened my eyes to see if I should jump out of the doomed machine. I didn’t see anything wrong, but I did see a breathtaking view of the Jersey beaches (don’t laugh, they’re superb toward the south) that only ended when I was pulled down at 1000Gs so rapidly and viciously that I was unable to close my eyes again.

I sat through the entire minute with my eyes wide open, walked off the ride, bought another ticket and got right on again. I haven’t closed my eyes since.

There are incredible vistas to behold at the tops of hills and at the heights of our lives. Too often we miss them because our eyes are closed in fear of the impending drop we’re sure will consume us, or because we’ve been unable to interrupt our repetitive ride through peaks and troughs.

Many of us open our eyes that is, really try to see only in momentary depressions and valleys, and what we see, therefore, is ourselves at the bottom. Our subliminally repeating picture is one of craning our necks to look up, already fearing the heights to which we supposedly aspire. (Oscar Wilde said that we are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.)

What good is it to wallow in the depths without relishing the heights? I found that the people screaming on the coaster weren’t doing it out of fear, but out of conquest of the fear. And even on the greatest of coasters, only the first hill is truly the tough one.

We have to give ourselves permission to rejoice in the heights, to scream and to boast, to wave our arms and proclaim our triumph. “If you can do it, it ain’t braggin’,” said baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean, so why not assert our conquest: We’ve surmounted another obstacle, beaten back another challenge, thrived for another day. And unlike the roller coasters, there isn’t, inevitably, another hill ahead and the ride isn’t over in another minute. The coasters operate on gravity. Their momentum is governed by the laws of entropy. We operate on volition. Our momentum is governed by our own beliefs about ourselves.

I’ve regretted the coaster rides on which I never opened my eyes and wondered what views I’ve missed. But I’ve never regretted the ride of my life. It’s sometimes been rickety, there’s been a hell of a racket and a lot of people have been screaming. Sometimes my knuckles have been white and my teeth clenched.

But gads, what a view I’ve had.

©Alan Weiss, Balancing Act, March 2001. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Alan Weiss, Ph.D., is a consultant, speaker and bestselling author of 64 books, the newest of which is "Fearless Leadership: Overcoming Reticence, Procrastination and the Voices of Doubt Inside Your Head." Described by the New York Post as "one of the most highly regarded independent consultants in America," his consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz and more than 500 other leading organizations.