DARE | Escape | Dip your head under the water and listen

From now on, I’ll write two letters a week instead of one.

This is an excerpt from “Dare,” book #3 in the Repossible series.

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”

— Albert Einstein

I have a clear vision of the word escape. Maybe it’s because I’m an author, a fan of words, a lover of turns of phrase. 

But I’m also terribly visual. To a fault. I “see” things in line charts, in IMAX-quality visions, and I do my best to describe them in words—if we’re in a book, which we are here. 

It’s often a room or a conference center or something like a concert hall. There are lots of people in seats and it’s like a bowl with the sides rising up, sometimes quite steep. 

Again, I don’t know, I don’t “see” these things on purpose or consciously, they just come to me, but we float or rise to the top, just like a helium balloon would do. 

There at the top, we find a portal and we can easily open it. We pull ourselves through (gravity isn’t quite doing its thing at this time) and we’re out. 

We’re up in the sky or the clouds or space or…whatever it is that means escape for you. 

From here, we lie down on our stomachs and look back down into the hall. We can often see ourselves (or our old selves) down in the hall. We can see clearly and yet also from a higher perspective. So both a wide-angle lens and a zoom lens—but at the same time. 

We can see clearly.

We observe, listen, and quickly and silently learn what we need to do, how we need to think, where we need to go from here. 

This is the place above from which we can make better decisions, to dare or not dare to do the thing, and it’s easy from up here and we know why we decide what we do. 

That’s it. That’s often my escape. 

The Ocean

If that visual doesn’t work, have you ever been scuba diving or snorkeling? 

When you’re floating on the surface of the ocean, ideally a calm place, you see the sky and hear the wind and the waves but once you put your head under water, it’s a different world. 

But no, really, truly, and clearly a different world. 

It sounds different—there are bubbles we hear and squeaks and squawks. 

It looks different but even how we see it. Probably through a face mask and things might be magnified or zoomed in or out. 

Fish and critters swim around you. If you poke your head back above, nothing, none of this seems to exist but you pull your head back under and it’s all right there—you can touch it—or try. 

Two worlds and you’re in the middle of them. You’re right there at the border and you have access to either and both. Just with a lift or drop of your head, you’re in both, you’re a part of them together and yet separately. 

Escape

Two worlds, both accessible, both clearly in existence, and you have the key to both right there right now. 

You choose. 

Later in the Repossible series comes a book called “Meditate.” Meditation is the water-free version of this that is accessible to you all the time without need for face masks. 

What was that quote from that guy at the beginning of this chapter? Oh yes, that’s right, something about limits.

“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”

Albert Einstein

Accept your limits.

Go beyond them.

Escape.

* * *

Andy

Andy wanted new books for the prison library. He wrote a letter every single week to the city library asking for donations. 

After a long, long time, he he got a response and they succumbed to his incessant banter. 

They sent him some books. 

But rather than rest on his laurels and declare victory and stop with the letters and quit while he was ahead, he saw that he had broken through a glass wall, he had ascended to a point never before reached, and this was the sign to him that he could go higher.

Rather than see the dip under the water of the ocean as the victory, he saw it as the entryway, the portal to another dimension or world or level and then made his move. 

He didn’t just dunk his head under, he took a deep breath and dove into a whole new world that opened up because he took the action, he stuck with it, and made it happen. 

“From now on, I’ll write two letters a week instead of one.”

— Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption

He didn’t just “keep going” but he doubled down and went all in. 

SPOILER ALERT: After two letters a week for a while, the library donated more books, money, and an expansion of the library.