47 isn’t just my age — it’s also your opportunity

Today is my 47th birthday. Another year, another chance to reflect and plan….or regret and ignore. That IS what we do, isn’t it? We muse on our mortality and dissect our dashed dreams — or we review and celebrate what we’ve accomplished, no matter how small, no matter if where we are now is backwards from where we’ve been at some other point in our lives. We celebrate where we are and we plot out a course for something new and exciting we want to consider creating in our world.

“What would you do if you had no fear?”

That’s actually the name of a book that Diane Conway wrote back in 2004. The subtitle was “Living your dreams while quakin’ in your boots.” Which is kinda awesome at first glance. It runs right along with the “feel the fear and do it anyway” book by Susan Jeffers. I decided when I turned 30 that every year I would face a new fear and do something I’d never done before. That year, I jumped out of an airplane. Seems remarkable enough. What made it more remarkable was that I was afraid of heights after a close call in high school where I was hanging gutters on a veeerrrryyyyy tall church on a veeerrrryyyyy windy day. The problem was, when I jumped out of the airplane, I was sooooo terrified that I didn’t really get to enjoy the experience.

Trying to take action in the face of a fear is great, sometimes. But most of the time our fear is overwhelming, it gets in the way of being present to the experience and opportunities that start appearing when we set a positive…