Not Ready? Jump Anyway!

When I was many heads shorter than I am now, I took my first swimming lesson. Some twenty skinny kids lined up at the swimming pool, all of us with various mixtures of excitement and fear. The teacher asked, “Who can swim?”

My hand goes up, just like the hands of another three or four kids. We shuffle to the edge of the pool, where the deep end is.

I know she asked, "Who can swim?" just as I know that I can not. But, I thought, it's only logical that I have to jump into the water to learn swimming.

Bony as I was, there was little that provided buoyancy except the air trapped between my scalp and the ugly green rubber bathing cap.

But then, I wasn’t thinking about any such insignificancies. I jumped.

In seconds that ugly bathing cap abandoned me and I sank like a rock.

They pulled me out and emptied all that water that got in the wrong tube and I learned a lesson:

Next time, try harder.

I still do this. I jump long before I’m ready. That is probably the main reason why I published independently. And just now, I did another such jump. It began with Facebook.