Last night a friend and mentor told me a story that I can’t get out of my head.
A group of tourists were walking out in the open plains of Africa when darkness began to set in.
The tour guide smiled as a roar in the distance startled them.
Instinctively they began to move away from the source of the sound.
“Let me tell you something about the roar.”
The tourists stopped, flinching every time another roar broke the silence of the wind blowing through the high grass.
“That roar is coming from the male lion. Most likely he is old and toothless from years of fighting and protecting his territory.”
He paused a second, as another roar echoed through the plains.
“What you don’t hear, is what will get you killed. You see, the lionesses hunt in packs. They wait for the old toothless lion to make a lot of noise to scare prey to them.”
The tourists began to fidget, freezing where they were.
“My advice to you if you hear that sound and I’m not here to guide you?”
The tourists were holding their breath.
“Go for the roar.”
So often the noise in my brain is like that roar.
I don’t want to deal with hard decisions. Don’t want to face bad news. Don’t want to have a confrontation because I’m standing up for something I believe in and other people don’t agree. Or in some cases, don’t want to see the looks on the faces of people who flat out hate me for my convictions.
There is a perception of safety that if I stay away from the roar, I will avoid having to deal with the source of that sound.
But out in the grasses of that false sense of security are the real predators.
I remember not wanting to face the roar of our infertility diagnosis.
My image of the monster making that noise meant I would have to come face to face with needing IVF at a clinic away from home.
I ran away from it, and we got attacked by one failed cycle after another.
Ran away from the idea that we needed the help of clinics with the highest SART rankings, and watched Lisa’s soul torn apart by four failed IVFs.
Then I ran towards the roar.
As it turns out, that sound was coming from a harmless figment of my worst fears and imaginations.
It had no teeth when I finally met it face to face.
That’s because the source of that roar was all in my head. The real dangers always existed in avoiding that confrontation. Compromising what I knew needed to be done. Or going against my own instinct.
Don’t make the same mistake I made, no matter how frightening that sound may be.
Go for the roar.