Pretty Much Just Water Slides, Part 3

Shortly after I turned 30, I realized that water slides are fun. Now, I have yet to go to one of the big stand-alone water parks with the super high slides that my mother-in-law once said seem to be designed for feminine hygiene purposes. (It's a douche that gives you a wedgie!) But I started with the tame offerings of a Disney World hotel kiddie pool a couple of years ago and worked my way up to, last week, riding in a tube with David down the 'Whiplashing Whirlwind of Possible-Lingering-Injury', screaming a few choice expletives and trying not to lose my contact lenses.

Many people spend their youth believing they're invincible. They take risks, strike out, goof around and then, eventually, settle down and develop more caution. I did this backwards. I was so careful and cautious. No risks, or at least very few. I wrapped myself in safety, taking it as some assurance that fear and pain were optional and I could opt out quite happily. Didn't try anything I might fail. Didn't do anything when I couldn't foresee a happy ending. And it did produce a happy life, for a time.

But then, you learn. We all learn. Fear and pain are not optional - they are standard features. No, they are essential components - parts of the engine that drives the whole human experience. Rejecting those things means a flat life, lived on level surfaces, and it means you're all the more shocked and dismayed when a chasm opens up beneath you. If you have no experience with the dynamic of falling, then the fall hurts you twice because you haven't yet grieved the notion that you might never fall in the first place. And after a few tough years in a row, I just didn't fear that sliding, sinking, falling sensation so much anymore. It's not that I was numb to it - far from it.

It's that I knew eventually I'd splash down into a pool of water that buoyed me up again, that I could wipe the sopping strands of hair from my face, blink my contacts back into place, and rise up to climb again. Also, I started to look at my whole life, this entire human experience, as a place where we come to play. To learn, to test our mettle, to laugh and scream and sputter and get scared together. Can I see it as a safe place, rather than somewhere to be scared of? I don't mean to imply that we come through unscathed. Bones and hearts are broken, and there is no shame in resting on a lounge chair or sitting in a warm, bubbly pool. But if I'm able, can I move from the comfortable placidity of the Lazy River to the thrills of the highest, scariest slide, trusting that it's still all been designed to create joy? There is still fear in that slide. There is, as my mother-in-law intimated, discomfort in our most sensitive places. But there's a unmatchable thrill in trusting that the water will carry your body safely down, that eventually you will land, that you will come up and out, that you will take a moment to breathe, that there's more fun to be had.