fortune favours the brave

WARNING:
EXCESSIVE USE OF METAPHOR AHEAD. PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION.

My beloved Snazzles keeps a slip of paper in her wallet. This slip of paper was received inside a fortune cookie, and reads (approximately):
"WHEN TESTING THE WATER, DO NOT USE BOTH FEET."

Now - while for Snazzles this may be good to remember (and I can say that because she knows that her inherent emotional enthusiasm is just one of the myriad reasons I love her and need her like a limb) - it is not advice I personally often need. Munkey is a look-before-you-leap kind of creature. I can often be found gently dipping a toe in the pool and still debating the pros and cons of immersion, long after everyone else has swum off to discover the New World.

This seems to be changing.

Recently, I find my surly sensible brain completely undermined and overridden by the pounding heat of my heart and a profound optimism burning brightly in my belly. A certain someone has charmed me so effectively that I have found myself throwing caution to the wind, and allowing myself to be dictated by emotions that would normally be kept under wraps until things were much more certain. Essentially, I am in deep water and the shore is getting further and further from sight. It is profoundly exciting - like a new lease on life - but also quite terrifying.

However there is a hand holding mine, and we seem to be swimming side by side. Somehow I feel that as long as we are able to continue together, this could be something exquisite - the kind of thing they wrote songs and made movies about in the Old Days. On the other hand, if the journey turns rough and we lose the will or ability to travel as one, I believe both of us will suffer. That is what I'm terrified of. Not just my own hurt, but the thought that someone else so wonderful will be injured as well. This is the kind of thing that sometimes just falls apart. Sometimes circumstances conspire against beautiful things and destroy them.

BUT, I will not be pessimistic. Frankly, just now, I feel incapable of it. Due to the nature of my brain, I can't entirely dispell the shadowy doubts, but at the moment those doubts are feeble by comparison with the golden light that has been allowed to flood in by this opening-up of potential. Suddenly it seems that something I had all-but resigned myself to never participating in, is happening to me almost effortlessly. And more to the point - though it seems inconceivable - I also feel like I deserve this... that both of us do.

Sometimes, surely, beautiful things can survive the slings and arrows of the world around them, and come out the other side stronger and brighter. I have never subscribed to the "I won't try, because I might fail" mindset. I have been let down too many times by people who won't take a chance on me for the fear that it might not work out. Fuck 'em - their loss. If you're not going to take the chance of failing, how are you ever going to succeed? Years ago, my mother and father gave me a framed piece of calligraphy which still hangs in my flat (although I have taken its advice far too seldom) which reads "Man cannot discover new oceans until he has courage to lose sight of the shore". As I sheepishly expressed my hopes and fears to Snaz the other night ("It might all go horribly wrong!") she was wise and hilarious, as always (a combination few can master, but which comes naturally to her). "It could ALL go horribly wrong! Everything in the world could go horribly wrong," She exclaimed melodramatically. "This meal could go horribly wrong!" she gestured to the Take-Away Chinese we were dishing up for dinner. "We could all get food poisoning and be dead by tomorrow." It didn't arouse huge confidence in our dinner, but it was a good point.

When something appears out of nowhere, like this (the charming beautiful man, not the Chinese dinner), we owe it to the random winds of fortune - and ourselves, and each other - to grasp it with both hands and treasure it.

(Incidentally, nobody got sick from the Chinese Take-Away. Also, there were no fortune cookies. But that's okay. I don't need a slip of paper to show me the way. Here is my hand, you wonderful person. Let's find the way together.)