Surprising Yourself

When you're young, you think you have all the time in the world to take advantage of all the opportunities life offers. By the time you realize you don't, your mind and body are often not eager to cooperate. That's one of the reasons I insisted on taking our dream trip to Italy even when I knew it wasn't the best use of our financial resources. Some things are worth doing no matter what the cost. Ask my husband now about his reservations about that trip and he'll tell you it was the best money we ever spent. That's the thing about grasping opportunity when it comes your way. You're not usually sorry about the things you do. It's the opportunities you leave on the table that come back to haunt you.

That's why I couldn't be happier for my sister. This weekend, she didn't let a little thing like being terrified out of her mind stop her from stepping out on the edge and trying something new. Twice she stood for two hours on a stage and conquered that frightened inner voice that holds us back. Despite being a seasoned musical performer, this time she took a leap out of her comfort zone - a role in a new serious comedy called My Occasional Torment. The play's themes of love, marriage, aging and insecurities hit a bit too close to home. That would have been reason enough to have said no to the part (which she did more than a couple of times). Once she got past that roadblock, she had to face her real demon - memorizing one hundred pages of dialogue. As someone who struggles to recite her own cellphone number, I don't know how she did it. Didn't she? She did. (Sorry. Had to steal a line from the show). There she was, in the spotlight, in front of one hundred and fifty people, pushing herself to do something that she truly feared she would be unable to do. Two packed houses and two standing ovations begged to differ.

And next weekend, she gets to do it again. Maybe she'll be a little less terrified, maybe not. But she'll be there. As she wrote on her Facebook wall the morning after opening night, 'We're capable of so much more than we ever think we are'. Amen.