I have a story about risk-taking with my stand-up. It took me so much courage to get up that first time, over five years ago. At the time, I had just experienced some lifechanging major personal breakthroughs, and felt myself in a very risk-taking, why-not mode, but still I had to muster up the nerve.

I did it once, fittingly on my (re)birthday, and I loved it. But still, I only performed a handful of times over the next couple of years because I was scared and hesitant. Then after I graduated from school, I still waited and planned and held my breath. Until finally, I thought to myself, “you can’t wait anymore” and I wholeheartedly started and the momentum followed. And I’m glad I did.

I think it’s a continuous process and a journey, but there are moments where you just have to:

Leap and the net will appear.
~Zen saying

Yes/No reminds me of a class I took in college, The Literature of Community. The professor would print out a black-and-white statement based on the story we’d just read, something like, “The main character is a bigot.” You were to sit by the window if you agreed, and sit by the door if you disagreed. Sitting in the middle was discouraged – he emphasized the danger of not making a decision, citing all the people in Nazi Germany who were complicit by not taking a stand against Hitler. That class transformed me from a self-proclaimed pragmatist to the idealist I am today.

When we – my now ex-husband, my two children who were then 6 and 4 – moved to DC in 1998 after many years living abroad, all I had to guide me was intuition and the word ‘yes’.

I learned how to choose ‘yes’ from ‘no’ in a class I took at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

As the spouse of a Knight fellow – I could take any class I could talk myself into, and I talked myself into a class called “Creativity in Business.”

The class was about how to get there from here, how to get to the next place from the not working place.

After living on someone else’s agenda for nine years, it was a relief to find the technology, so to speak, to create the next part.

Every week we had a new exercise, which started with “Be Awake” and included making mandalas, meditating, and for me, articulating what I feared most about divorcing my husband of 10 years.

Mostly, my fears were about money.

The Yes/No week was the most powerful, the week we had to make decisions ‘yes/no.’ No equivocating. Pick it. Yes, no.

Ironically, my ex – who took the class the semester afer I did – found the yes/no week the most powerful for him and the one in which he saw our marriage was a ‘no’. And I did, too.

Yes/No still guides me every day. Yes: sushi for dinner. No: not that color for the wall paint.

It’s so uncomplicated. Choosing ‘yes’ seems so simple, but it amazes me how we end up rationalizing it.

And being reasonable is always the least alive way of living.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”