Don’t look down.

I want to tell you a secret… shhhhh… come close.

It would not be good for everyone to hear these things.

The secret to a lot of life?

Don’t look down.

You see, like cartoons the physics of life is very similar in ways people handle things.

I was over at my cousin’s recently shooting pool and afterward for a few moments we went up to the living room with his ginormous TV and I was trying to get him into the TV show Special Forces:

No luck on that front but while we were watching the first episode the thing that became clear (mainly because I had seen the episode before) was that it was clear who was going to be the first to drop out and why.

Mind you, I don’t even know the people on this show, that’s how out of touch with celebrity I am but I do find the show fascinating. In the course of the first episode, a woman named Brittany Cartwright (how these people are celebrities I just don’t know) spends the bulk of the episode in each situation uttering two words over and over and over and over again.

The magic words?

‘‘I can’t’

And sure enough? She couldn’t!

It really dovetails into the first law of cartoon physics:

Members of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers were inspired to publish the “Cartoon Laws of Physics” in 1994. Since then, cartoon physics has been a topic of Internet discussion. Cartoon gravity, for example, doesn’t always work. Cartoon Law 1 states that a body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. This happens when the cartoon character walks off a cliff. That toon just continues walking until he/she/it happens to look down, then he begins to fall.

Life is very much like a cartoon in that way, throughout the course of your life you will find yourself often in situations that appear to be insurmountable, challenges you cannot begin to imagine overcoming.

And honestly, there ARE a lot of situations in life where it may be impossible to overcome what you’re facing but the truth is that if you say you can’t or if you look down into the maw of failure then you are predetermining an outcome.

This is very ironic coming from me. I mean, I happen to be very cynical in a lot of ways but at the heart of every cynic is the seed of a true believer, an optimist that is afraid of being disappointed.

I had started a post awhile ago about the toe cutting thing which I will likely go back to and I’m not posting it here because that one goes off on a tangent as it is. The thing about the whole toe cutting thing was not thinking about it, not looking down. Not picking away at it like a scab of the mind.

I can obsess over things as much as the next person but if I just don’t think about things so much and do something, even if it’s a little something towards achieving a goal, then eventually I’ll get there.

It’s something that Joel Osteen makes a part of many of his sermons even though those talks are based around faith. You don’t have a lot of control around the external world but what you do have control over is your own thinking, your inner voice, the things you choose to focus on and you can save yourself a lot of pain by not looking down. Try it and see if it doesn’t work.