All you need to do is stretch the slightest bit further. You are nearly there. You think to yourself “I wish I could be taller, why did my parents give me these useless genetics”. Just a little bit further…Then you step back down and gaze up to where you want to go. That thick, wooden branch is two arm distances away. So with all your energy, force, and power you jump. You got it. You are hanging from the branch. Now what? Before your hands start to slide off, you position your feet against the trunk and embark on lugging yourself up. While sitting on that first branch, you feel excellent. You accomplished the hardest part. The entire way up the tree, from now on is effortless.
That is what happened to me when I climbed my first tree. From then on I loved climbing trees. Every single tree in my backyard I would be in, or have already climbed. So I would start climbing the trees in the neighbors lawns. I began to read books in trees and bluntly became obsessed.
The firsts for everything is exciting, thrilling and a new experience. You learn from what you have done, and only become better. I’m talking about the “firsts” that you choose to do. Not the kind like getting your first speeding ticket because that is out of your control. (Other than you pushing the gas pedal a little bit too hard.) A first thing we remember. It is imprinted in our brains because we have that uncertain, uncomfortable, and unstable feeling. We don’t know what we are doing, but try it out anyway. Once the excitement runs out, the first has been overused we move on to something more intense. This works for drugs as well. Once the typical “druggy” has smoked enough weed, then they move on to harder drugs like coke. Or shrooms, the types that would give them a different type of high, also known as: a new experience.
Once you are comfortable with driving a car, you begin to speed, try sharper turns, reverse all the way down the street or pull the hand brake in the winter. Once you learn how to read, you begin to read longer book, books with difficult vocabulary and words you might not understand, you read more books per week and so on. In everything in life, we progress. From our first experience that we remember we will always learn and better from it. That is why it is so important not to regret. We learn. We grow, and people do change.
By: Sharon Lazarow
