Life Lessons from a 10-Year-Old and a Tubing Session

Mar 18

This last weekend I went tubing with my husband, my father, and my 10-year-old son. Of the four of us, I was the only one who had ever been tubing. I was excited to return to a fun activity, and my husband and father were excited to try a new event.

My son was excited, but he was also scared. It’s a big hill, so I understand having some fear. However, his ability to overthink this situation was VERY impressive. Here’s some of the questions he was asking me:

What if I crash into the pole?
What if I go to far and land on a car?
What if I break a bone?
Will the tube break?
Will it break like my sled did?
Do I have to walk up the hill?
Is the tube heavy?
What if I get stuck?
What if it goes too fast?
What if I get to the top and I’m too afraid to go down?
What if I don’t want to go down by myself?
Will it go slower if I ride with you? (He doesn’t understand that more weight means you go faster.)

As my father, husband and myself were trying to convince him that it was all fine, and it was going to be fun, I found myself saying this:

You can’t have fun without a little fear, and you can’t have adventure without some risk.

That got me thinking. This rings true for most things you do in life, not just riding an over-sized air tube down a snowy mountain. Many things you experience will potentially involve something that scares you, or some level of risk.

This is where you have the ability to choose fun and adventure!

In every decision you make, you analyze whether or not you’ll stay with something you know (something comfortable) or to expand a little and do something that scares you a bit. The times that you choose to step out of that comfort zone are the times that you’ll grow.

Marissa Mayer, co-founder of Lumi Labs, describes it well:

I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.”

I can tell you now that my son was not mentally ready to go down that hill. However, after some gentle motherly persuasion, he went down the hill… for an hour and a half!