Birthday Plunges and Competition
Last birthday, I found myself 28-years old and standing on a narrow slab of rock atop the long fishermen pier at Coney Island: clothes strewn in a pile on the floor, a wicked wind slapping my bare skin, wondering what kind of lunatic I was.
If I am being honest, I was there chasing my youth. My then 17 year-old brother Sammy and his friend had been raving about the epic “pier jumps” that they were participating in with increasing regularity. Surely I wasn’t too old to partake.
So there I was, with doubts about my sanity, but with something to prove to myself. I threw myself off the pier 50 feet out, as the onlookers- a ragtag crowd of fisherman, nature lovers and what appeared to be Asian tourist- looked on with a combination of confusion, awe, shock and admiration.
We swam back to shore giggling like madmen, surfaced on the beach, ran back the length of the the pier and jumped off again.
“Forever young, I wanna be, forever young.”
—————————————————————
Yesterday, on my 29th birthday, my phone vibrated in my pocket, it was Mofo. “Ready to plunge?”
Sure. A tradition was in the making. I liked it.
I had plunged two handfuls of times in the last few month, a bunch of those with Mofo (lest you think his random call more fortuitous than it was), but no matter how often I plunge, the resistance returns in full before the next one.
I felt it as soon as I committed to meet him and felt it grow with each subsequent moment: as I drove to the beach and with each step I took, from the blue path at the entrance to Lock Arbor all the way to the ocean, the sand growing cold and damp beneath my feet, the cool winds swelling around me, and the turbulent ocean growing larger and more daunting.
“Who would be crazy enough to do this,” I stroked my ego to keep myself moving forward.
And then, as we sat down, and began to hyperventilate ourselves, ala Wim Hof, to prime our physiology for the cold, we saw 2 younger girls, probably somewhere between 15 and 20 splashing around the ocean as if it were a heated swimming pool.
There was no sign that they even thought the water cold; they were casually conversing, walking in and out and riding waves; meanwhile Mofo and I were breathing like madmen as if we were about to perform an epic feat by submerging ourselves briefly and exiting.
I was irritated and told Mofo as much. “Focus on your own journey,” he responded. But I was. My own journey just involved me once again challenged by the youth around me. If they could reach this level so could I.
I got up, walked towards the ocean and, without even the slightest hesitation, dove in. The shock was there, the cry of my physiology and my soul, the protestation of every particle of my being, but instead of celebrating my success and exiting, I just kept walking further dunking again and again.
Within a minute the water felt warm against my skin. I wasn’t competing with the girls anymore, simply using their impetus to discover what I had been taught about cold immersion. That my body was capable of adapting to anything. I dunked again and again and spent the next 10 minutes in the water.
Tahareni, Refaeni, Tzadekeni.
May this year be filled with vigor, passion, challenge and growth.
I can be a competitive person. Many times I am ashamed of my own competitive drive and disturbed by the competition I see around me.
It seems unfortunate that two friends or siblings can find themself in the midst of competition. The emotions that competition sometimes drudges up seem impure. And too often, people do terrible things in the name of competition, like Kain and Hebel, Yosef and his brothers.
Very often I look at our community and mourn the fact that it seems we are consistently looking to one-up each other with more and more expensive clothing, houses and parties.
But as I hope this story demonstrates, competition can also have a more positive side. In many cases, competition is precisely that which allows us to access parts of ourselves we would never have imagined possible. Competition doesn’t need to be vindictive, or angry it can simply be an invitation to grow, challenge can be that which gives us the opportunity to grasp what we are capable of.
You don’t need to spend your birthday in the ocean to welcome challenge into your life and to use it as an invitation to find your edge, to recognize that you are so much more powerful than you ever could imagine.
