Diving Board

When I was a very small child, I took swim­ming lessons at the pub­lic pool. I assume there was some trep­i­da­tion on my part, but learn to swim I sort of did, at the shal­low end of the pool. How­ev­er, as part of the course­work, we had to jump off the div­ing board at the deep end of the pool. I was­n’t very keen on doing that.

In fact, I would­n’t do it. For day after day I refused to make the leap. See­ing oth­er kids do it and sur­vive [mirac­u­lous­ly] did noth­ing to con­vince me to jump off the board. Hav­ing some­one there to catch me did noth­ing to con­vince me to jump off the board. I end­ed up hav­ing to get bribed into it. I believe the promise was a G.I. Joe of some sort. I also recall try­ing to whee­dle an entire vehi­cle out of the per­son [my grand­fa­ther i think, i was very very young] who was brib­ing me.

I end­ed up jump­ing off the div­ing board, of course. But I think that my point in telling this sto­ry is that from an ear­ly age, I have been either unwill­ing to take risks or unwill­ing to do some­thing that does­n’t have some sort of tan­gi­ble reward. I’m still hes­i­tant to do any­thing risky [most­ly emo­tion­al­ly] unless I’m cer­tain of some sort of pos­i­tive out­come. This is prob­a­bly very self­ish.