"Leap of Faith" by Jay Wilburn
My teaching certificate expired on
June 30th of this year. I taught for sixteen years before quitting
to take care of my younger son’s health needs, but also to pursue a dream of
being a full-time writer. There was a stretch of doubtful days there. Both with
the medical care of my son and the notion of making a living at writing, there
were some dark days. Eventually he grew better and I started expanding my
income with my own fiction and with ghostwriting. Both sources of income were
slow builds. There was more than once that I considering packing it up and
going back to teaching. I believe teaching is a noble profession, but I also
believe I am done with it. Each time I stuck it out with doing what people say
is not possible, we made it a little bit further. I was surrounded by people
who doubted I could pull it off and expressed their doubts in ways that would
pull down my spirit. I had to fight through that and keep my skin too tough to
let that in.
All important decisions require a
leap of faith. You usually can’t see where you are going to land. You just kind
of trust that you are going to land one way or the other. Others won’t make
that same leap because they can’t see the landing spot and if it is too far
down, you could die. They’ll resent you for jumping when they would not. Some
of the people who celebrate the successful landing resent the fact that you
survived the fall, but just don’t want to be the person that expresses such a
thing out loud. Leaps of faith almost always come
before the other side of the jump is ready and secure. You could wait a few
months or a few years until the other option is ready. You can wait until the
construction of the other life has been completed, the inspections are done,
and it looks secure. That is what a responsible person does. The problem is
that when you are going for something beyond what most people think is
possible, the other side of the leap is never finished before jump time. There
will be other opportunities and you can wait, but often the wait becomes the
life. You can resent yourself for not jumping and resent those that jumped
anyway. The risk is never going to be gone and often the secure life can fall
apart like it wasn’t supposed to do while you are waiting for the risk on the
other side of the intended leap to mitigate itself.
I always caveat these discussions
of writing full-time by saying there is nothing wrong with keeping a day job
and writing in the spare moments. There is nothing cowardly in that choice. I’m
not telling people to quit their jobs. I’m also not telling you that you can’t.
If you resent people who have leapt or resent yourself for not leaping, the
healthy choice is either to leap or to find peace in the choice you are making.
Look at it as a choice instead of a trap. Believe that you are strong enough to
face the day whether it is conquering the monsters you know all too well
because you are stronger than them or whether it is leaping to conquer the
unknown. You can fight either battle, but never think that you are trapped. The
worst that can happen with either choice is that you fail miserably and have to
start over. People do it all the time.
My biggest fear used to be losing
my job. I hated getting up in the morning and feared losing the job at the same
time. So many of us fight and pray to keep jobs and lives that we hate. When
they do fall apart, we land somewhere eventually. Sometimes it is a painful
journey to the landing, but we often look back where we were standing and are
so thankful to not be there anymore. One thing you can be pretty sure
of in your life: one day you will either leap or you will fall from where you
are standing at this moment and you will land somewhere. It is great to look
back once the journey is over and to be less afraid of that drop than you were
before.
Jay Wilburn lives with his wife and two sons in Conway,
South Carolina near the Atlantic coast of the southern United States. He taught
public school for sixteen years before becoming a full time writer. He is the
author of the Dead Song Legend Dodecology and the music of the five song
soundtrack recorded as if by the characters within the world of the novel The
Sound May Suffer.
Follow his many dark thoughts on Twitter @AmongTheZombies,
his Facebook author page, and at JayWilburn.com
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