Many years ago, I convinced my husband that we should apply for the TV reality show, The Amazing Race. The show takes teams of two and has them travel around the world following clues and doing whatever the clues tell them to do. For each leg of the race, the last team to arrive to the pit stop is eliminated until at last the final victorious team takes home the million dollar prize. I didn’t care as much about the prize money as I did about the thrill of the competition. It was a crazy idea, but since I had gone along with some of my husband's crazy ideas throughout the years, he figured he owed me one and agreed to sign up.
The actual process of applying was quite lengthy, a fact which made me happy since I figured it would weed out the wanna-be participants. We had to fill out a 20 page questionnaire answering everything from our greatest fear, to which celebrity people say we reminded them of (in case you’re wondering, mine was Elaine from Seinfeld). We also had to apply for a passport and put together a three minute creative video of why we should be chosen for the show.
We decided to make our video clip as exciting as possible and had some friends who were willing to spend the day videotaping our “pretend” canoe adventure down the river which included, at one point, the appearance of us dropping over a huge waterfalls and coming up from the wreckage of our capsized canoe. I don’t think we had ever laughed as hard as we did putting our video together. Each Sunday night we would sit together and watch the next episode of The Amazing Race, imagining that we were there and feeling our pulses race trying to decide what we would do if we were in the same position as the participants. It was the highlight of my week and led to some sleepless nights of imagining the thrill of racing around the world with my husband to places we had only heard about (oh, and beating the competition!).
I started dreaming about jumping out of a plane, one of my greatest fears, and wondered what it would feel like to conquer that fear if push came to shove (quite literally if you wanted to get me out of a plane!). I started going to the pool to lap swim to prepare myself for the possibility of being dropped into the ocean, another fear of mine. I knew my husband had fewer fears than me, and I definitely didn’t want to be the reason we didn’t win The Amazing Race, so I pushed myself to deal with my fears.
As you might have guessed, we were never chosen to be on the show. It was quite a disappointment at first, but then I realized something. Just applying for the show had changed me. My husband’s willingness to do something crazy just because he loved me, knowing how much it meant to me, is something I will never forget. Hearing my heart beat inside my chest at the thought of doing something daring and crazy made me feel alive-- fully alive-- for the first time in many years.
Applying for The Amazing Race made me look at life through a different lens. It forced me to ask myself the question, “What have I been so afraid of and why have I held myself back from living life fully every day?”
What about you? Are you living each day fully alive or have you given up on your dreams? It’s never too late to wake up the risk-taker, airplane-jumper, ocean-braver inside of you and start living out who you were created to be.
I double dog dare you!
Stay the course…
Sheila
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