Break Free
Mixed media on canvas
30″ x 30″
©2015 Louise Gallagher

BY MOTHER GOOSE

A bird will never learn to fly if it stays in the nest and never risks falling. A mother bird knows her offspring must fly free of her sheltering wings. It is the call of nature.

A child will never learn it has the capacity to fly freely if the mother holds on too tightly.  We must teach them they can fly, even when we fear they will fall. It is the call of love.

The same is true for ‘the inner child’. The child who feared thunderstorms, snakes and the boogeyman, must learn as an adult that it is free of childhood fears by testing the boundaries of how far it can go today, free of the calling of the past.

We will never learn to break free of our comfort zones if we stay inside the boundary of our fear.

Breaking free is scary. The known fills our vision, luring us back into the comfort of what we are familiar with, those things we tell ourselves that keep us safe from falling.

The unknown looms large upon the horizon, calling us to test the boundaries, to break through the walls of what we believe keeps us safe from falling, just so we can see how far we can go.

It can be terrifying to step outside the walls of our secure and predictable lives to travel the unknown territory of our dreams. Even though we have a sense that the possibility of great reward lies out there, beyond what we know as our life today, we hesitate, make excuses, procrastinate for fear, out there, in that strange and unknown land of living our dreams, we might fall, get hurt, face failure, lose our way.

Frightened of what we cannot know until we attempt it, we negative fortune-tell our way into holding back from stepping forward. To make sense of our fear, we rhyme off our long list of predictions of all that can go, might go, will most definitely go wrong if we risk stepping out from beneath the shelter of our tried and true.

A baby bird will never fly free if it stays trapped within its shell.

We will never know how much we’re capable of if we stay trapped within the limiting beliefs we tell ourselves to keep us safe from falling.

Imagine if Humpty Dumpty never fell. Or, imagine if the all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had been able to put him back together again. He wouldn’t have been the same anyway. He’d have been all cracked up!

Go ahead. Crack the egg. Let Humpty have a great fall. He might like being all cracked up. Or better yet, he may discover he didn’t need the king’s men and horses anyway because the freedom of breaking free of his shell is worth the risk of breaking open and living life off the wall.