Tricks up your Sleeve. (or, how to scale the fence)

There's a great game I once played, where you're asked a series of questions and you fill in the answers. It's one of those psychological tests where the answers enable the therapist to make an analysis of your personality (or lack of one as the case may be).

One of the questions says...."you walk and walk and walk through a long long forest, and suddenly you come to a huge high wall. Too wide to walk around, too high to climb, too thick to burrow through, no stepladders in sight. What do you do?"

Fortunately, being a second born child, I've always been prone to breaking rules and rebelling against the status quo.

I know you can't see it... but the front of the gate in the pic above, has various signs saying, 'Private', and 'No Entry' and various other ferocious things. All in Spanish - which is good because I'm not sure that I would have felt so nonchalant and gung-ho if I'd understood that the property I was about to trespass through was a private hunting/shooting park.

Which brings us to the age old question: if you're not in the park to hear the leaves falling, do they still make a noise when they reach the ground? I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but I will say that what lay on the other side of that fence turned out to be one of the best days of my life.

Walking through that area. The beautiful nature, the perfect companionship of my friend, the feeling of adventure, and getting utterly well and truely lost, and then well and truely found again.

I think what I'm trying to say is....if you don't scale the fence sometimes, and get off the beaten path, and take some exquisite risks, you may miss some of the best days of your life.

Oh, and I also love the concept of keeping a trick up your sleeve. In the classroom, for those terrible moments when the lesson plan fails spectacularly, and you have to either improvise or die. And also in those other moments in life like when you can't read the map properly, or perhaps you have no more money in your purse, or you don't know where to get off the bus, or the path seems to end at a huge inpenetrable wall.

Smile. It could turn out to be one of the best days of your Life.