Living on the Edge…

Tonight I did something that made me think to myself…

“Logan, you are living really dangerously on this one.”

I took a shower during a thunderstorm.  

source: NY Times

I know, living on the edge right?  It had to be done though.  It’s been sticky and muggy here in the Southeast and I hadn’t washed my hair in 2 days (which is a long time now that it’s back to it’s normal brunette color…as a blonde I could go almost a week without washing.  Probably because my hair then was holding on for dear life to any oils that I’d stripped right out of it with the blonde-making process.  Anyhow, I digress.)

So I showered ridiculously fast tonight.  I stood under the water only to get wet and to rinse my hair, and with each thunder crack, I realized that I jumped to the end of the tub to get out of the way of the water…because after all, it’s through the water that the lightening is rumored to come, and then my poor eyeballs (and my whole self really) would be fried to a crisp if I didn’t move.

You don’t have to tell me…I know how ridiculous I am. I know.

But then I realized that I’m even more ridiculous than I’d thought.  About the third time I leapt from the stream into the safety of the cold, waterless air, I realized that if I wasn’t dead then, I’d probably made it through that particular lightening strike wherever it was.  After all, the thunder is the sound of lightening…and it comes AFTER the lightening strike, so my moving with each audible sound was utterly pointless.

And then I rinsed off and got out.  Still my total shower couldn’t have lasted longer than perhaps 4 minutes (which is super fast for this gal who enjoys the quiet alone time in there.)  And I got to chuckling to myself as I toweled off….

Living dangerously sure does look different now than it did over a decade or more in the past.  Once upon a time in the not so long ago, it was stupid things…things that now I shake my head at myself for having done.  Riding a motorcycle without a helmet, getting a stupid tattoo in a stupid location (just for your enjoyment at my expense, I should tell you that what looked like a ladybug at 16 now looks more like a cockroach…Oh, and piercing your belly button…that too doesn’t always turn out well years later…my hole never went away, so it looks like I now have a second smaller belly button above the regular one.  Let me tell you how awesome that is…UGH!  I digress again.)

“Life on the edge” was dumb stuff like walking on a railroad tressel over a ravine with no clue of the train schedule, or climbing a 200 ft water tower just to paint my name on the top.  Things that I did that sometimes I look back on and wonder what I was thinking, some things I stupidly did that caused baggage that I carried around for years, and some things that were just plain silly.  Some things I regret, and there are some things I don’t.  And some things make me a wiser person and a parent, but that doesn’t mean that I’d do all of them again.  (For the record…I would climb that water tower all over again though, even though I find now that I’m a little bit afraid of heights!)

But these days, it’s funny what feels dangerous to me!  Maybe I’ve gone all vanilla or something, I don’t know.  Or maybe, it’s that I realize that the things that are important to me just aren’t worth jeopardizing for something silly…or momentarily thrilling.  So now, I find myself living dangerously when I do things like shower during a thunderstorm, or ski outside of the wake, or cut my own bangs for the 5th time (which didn’t go well either for me last week!)  And I think that’s probably fine with me for now.  I’ll still ride a motorcycle (WITH a helmet, and a jacket, and heavy boots), and I’d still walk down railroad tracks (AFTER checking a schedule), and I’d get another tattoo (WITH thought put into the item and location.)

Source: Brusters.com

So who knows…I’m definitely not rocky road, but maybe I’m not totally vanilla either… probably more of a fudge ripple… mostly vanilla with a little streak of surprise swirling through when you don’t expect it.