I wonder if squirrels ever have a fear of heights.
Have you ever just sat and watched squirrels scurry up and down trees, running up and down their trunks, jumping from one branch and from the top of one tree to another with seemingly no effort or fear of falling? I especially love it when two or more squirrels start chasing each other up and down and round and round and over and across almost faster than I can keep up with them. Vertically, horizontally, it doesn’t really matter. They just go. It amazes me how they simply fly from one branch to another, from one tree to another, sometimes to and from branches that appear to be far too small and brittle to hold their weight, and they simply grab on and keep going. No fear, no hesitancy, just pure unadulterated energy and grace.
Now this isn’t to say they never fall, either to a lower branch or even to the ground. When I lived in northern Virginia just outside Washington DC, my neighbor in the townhouse next door had several bird feeders hanging from a tree behind her unit. No matter how far down from the branches she would hang those birdfeeders, the squirrels would always find a way to work their way down the skinny metal hangers, even hanging themselves upside down, to get to the bird seed. One day, as I watched this particular squirrel, he actually lost his hold and fell about five or six feet to the ground (not a small distance relative to his size). He sat there for a few seconds looking a bit dazed, as if he was thinking, “What the #(*! just happened?”, got up, and ran right back up the tree trunk and out across the same branch to work his way back out to the feeder. Pure determination. Purely unphased. It was if nothing had happened, or that what had just happened didn’t matter. He was strictly in the moment, focused only on his goal.
Why is it that some of us have absolutely no fear of heights? Think of those who scale the sides of the highest mountains in the world. How many have now reached the peak of Mt. Everest, or at least made the attempt, not just once but multiple times? And then there are those rock climbers who scale up the sides of perfectly vertical cliffs with nothing to protect them from a deadly fall but a rope and a few hooks (and sometimes not even that). Consider the men — and a few women — who barnstormed their way across America in the early days of flight, or the fighter pilots today who soar thousands of feet into the sky and perform almost impossible acrobatics with absolutely no hesitancy or apparent fear. Then there are those for whom just the thought of looking out a third story window scares them to death, much less standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and beholding in all the incredible grandeur that awaits them, simply because of their fear of falling off the edge into the abyss.
Consider not only physical heights, but also ascension into prosperity and abundance. Why is it that some people seem to be able to scale the heights of success with barely the blink of an eye, never looking down along the way, while others with similar intelligence and abilities barely make it off the ground? Is it the fear of falling into the abyss of failure that holds us back? Is it the fear that once we’ve scaled the mountain, we’ll lose sight of our base camp from which we began our journey? Is it simply the lack of knowing what magnificence awaits us at the top? Is it a fear that we may end up there all alone with no one to share our joy, or that those remaining below will think us fools or wonder who we think we are or walk away out of mere jealousy?
Is it possible we could profit from spending more time simply watching squirrels and learning from them the possibility that the only things we should fear, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once challenged, are our own mostly unfounded fears themselves?
