Try Everything…

I knew the day was fast approaching and yesterday, it finally happened…

My daughter got her driver’s license.

Yes, just two days after her 16th birthday, she and I headed up to the testing center in my truck and she took the “skills test” as they call it. I guess she did OK, because a little while later, she was mugging for the camera at the Revenue Office and getting her license. She still has to wait until August to actually drive alone, because that’s the end of her six-month probationary period or whatever, which is not something that I knew existed (it definitely did not exist eight years ago, which was the last time one of my kids had to take the driver’s test).

So, she passed on the first try, because of course she did. I wasn’t surprised, even though she’s honestly not the best driver in the world just yet. And you know what? Even if she had failed, she wouldn’t have been too down about it.

She would have known that eventually she’d have figured it out and passed it. That’s just how she is… unafraid to fail and unafraid to try new things.

A few years ago, there was this animated movie that came out called “Zootopia,” a nice enough family-friendly flick about animals that acted like humans, with their little city and such. Like a police officer rabbit, a fox who’s a con man, a lion who is the mayor. You might, appropriately enough for this column, remember the ads for the movie where there’s a super-slow sloth working at the DMV?

Anyway, one of the characters in the movie was a rock

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star gazelle voiced by the singer Shakira.

Her big song in the movie was called “(I Want to) Try Everything.” It’s an upbeat little ditty with a chorus that goes…

“I won’t give up.

No, I won’t give in, till I reach the end…

And then I’ll start again.

No, I won’t leave.

I want to try everything.

I want to try… even though I could fail.”

That’s a great message, and it reminds me of my daughter. She’s good at a lot of things, but she also does things she’s not necessarily great at but she enjoys doing them.

A while back, my wife saw a photo opportunity that perfectly captured this concept. She snapped a picture of babygirl getting out of the car to go to school. She was wearing her school backpack on her back, her softball backpack on her chest, she was carrying her baritone in her left hand and her guitar in her right hand. Also, she had a little tote around her shoulder containing a change of clothes and her track shoes, because she decided, God knows why, to take up pole vaulting as well.

She literally wants to try everything. And no, she’s not always a success. In fact, success isn’t even always the goal. She just wants to try. Maybe she’ll be good at it, maybe she’ll be bad, but she’s definitely not going to be left wondering what might have been. For the record, the pole-vaulting adventure was short-lived and not a success.

But it doesn’t matter… tennis, golf, the piano, cooking, fishing, gardening… whatever you’re doing, she wants to give it a shot.

There have been some misses (like the pottery wheel and an airbrush gun that are gathering dust under her bed) but that’s not important.

After all, Wayne Gretzky once opined, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

So, don’t be afraid to fail.

A recent Sunday school lesson I taught was about fear (part of a series on what keeps us from following The Lord the way we should. As part of the lesson we had to tell the rest of the class something we are afraid of. A lot of people had a lot of different things (death, public speaking, losing a loved one, cancer). I struggled to come up with something other than spiders (which was mostly, but not completely a joke, as evidenced by the quarter-sized hole in my arm from a brown recluse bite).

Eventually, though, I did come up with an answer…

Failure.

It’s true. I can think of more than a couple of times in my life that I did not “shoot my shot” because it was easier not to take the risk.

I’m working to overcome that a little bit here and there. It’s tough, but now, thanks in no small part to my daughter, I know it’s OK to try, even though I could fail.

Full disclosure though… I am still scared of spiders.