Surprises are lovely things, we all know that. But nothing is lovelier than the glimmer in the eyes of a person who has just surprised herself.
As the cliche goes, you’ll never know how far you can go unless you try. In training, you try to push yourself until you can no longer breathe, or until you feel your limbs are about to fall off. I haven’t gotten the chance to do that in the past couple of months so I didn’t really expect any surprises this evening.
But then one of the guys at Capoeira did one-hand push ups post-training. I was amazed by his ease. And because it is innate for Capoeiristas to imitate amazing things, I attempted to do it myself. Let me say that even at the peak of my strength training a couple of years back, I’ve never tried one-hand push ups. I always kinda thought it was a man thing and that it wasn’t something that I could do “anytime soon”. So tonight I did. And to my surprise, it wasn’t all too hard. And so it occurred to me that all this time, the only reason why I “couldn’t do it” is because I never tried.
This is just a small thing, I know. It’s not all too great an accomplishment. But I find this so important because of this: imagine all of the things that we could do if we stopped assuming that we can’t do them.
Imagine all of those little surprises we could make for ourselves.