Is this what a trapeze artist feels?

Posted on February 9th, 2007 by Sacha Chua

This is a fascinating feeling. I’m not sure if I’ve blogged it before.
There’s fear, yes. I can feel the stress in the tightening of my
ribcage, the shallowness of my breathing, the tension in my stomach.

But there’s also exhilaration at the prospects in front of me: not
just in terms of housing, but other things as well. Can I do it? I
*will* do it… but can I do it as well as I plan? Can I have it all?
So there’s that excitement.

There’s more here, though. There’s the fun I had with programming
competitions and puzzles and problem solving… Taking a knotty
problem, pulling out pieces of it, simplifying it until it’s
manageable, and then going for it. This translates into a methodical
management of risk.

And there’s my trust in the safety net, my plans for the worst case
scenarios.

One more: the acceptance of both future versions of myself: whether I
succeed or fail.

If I can feel this way with small things, what more when I can trust
myself with larger ones? =D Am I making too big a deal of it? I don’t
know; I’m certainly thinking a lot more about it than I think others
do. If I make a big deal of it but still manage to come through, then
that’s cool – this trains me to work under pressure and for higher
stakes even though my actual stakes are low. =)

Random Emacs symbol: keyboard-coding-system – Function: Return coding system specified for decoding keyboard input. – Variable: Specify coding system for keyboard input.

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