“As you travel through life, you will come upon a great chasm.  Jump!  It is not as far across as you may think.”

With this image of your life journey as a road that periodically brings you to a “great chasm,” notice what associations come to mind:  what have been the chasms that appeared on your journey, experiences and situations that seemed to threaten your forward movement because they were so large as to be overwhelming, with no way to get through or around or across them?

Pause and make note of the chasms you have already confronted.

As you recall these challenges, how did you deal with the chasm?  Did you turn around and go another way entirely, or did you look about until you saw a detour that would take you on a side trip but eventually allow you to return to the same route you were following?  Did you wait until someone else came along who could help you cross?  Did you recruit others to help you build a bridge over the chasm?  Think of all the practical, reasonable, adaptive ways you have dealt with life chasms, overwhelming challenges that initially looked impossible.  See that you have considerable experience with chasms.  You have managed to get across some of them, with help from others or with creative reworking of your plans; you have also known when a chasm presented an obstacle that could not be overcome and you adapted by letting that planned life road go and choosing another life road.

Now, recalling your chasms, have there been any that you took the risk of trying to leap across, probably against the advice of others around you, because you felt so called and so certain of your path that not even the vastness of the chasm would deter you from continuing?  Perhaps some of these leaps ended in disaster, as you crashed and had to recover and rebuild.  All of us experience risks that bring failure, even injury to ourselves and those we love, for life comes with no guarantees of constant success.

But have you also taken the risk of leaping across a life chasm and found your feet landing safely on the other side?  How did that feel?  And did you conclude that perhaps such a chasm only looked too wide to cross because of the distortions that fear brings to perceptions, that in fact it was not such a big chasm after all?  How did this discovery change the way you approached the next chasm you came upon?

We cannot journey through life without finding chasms along the way.  What matters most is whether we see them clearly and know when we simply need to gather ourselves and jump.