The Leap: Norma Wong on Leaving the Safety of What We Know

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Roshi Norma Wong is a Zen master and an Indigenous Hawaiian leader whose new book, When No Thing Works, is a call to a healing kind spiritual activism with wisdom, intention and care. Writing and weaving stories from different cultures, Wong’s encouragement to us is filled with what she calls ‘The Leap’ – a transformative jump that brings us out of the familiar and into the terrain of the unknown where wisdom often flourishes. In the excerpt from her book below, Wong is inspiring on the point of courage – that which is not the absence of fear, but “what we are about in the face of fear and doubt.”

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HOW DO WE ASPIRE and live into the emergent worldview, the nothing-less-so timeplace that feels enticingly beyond our reach?

Eyes on the horizon. Heart’s core tethered to Mother Earth as she connects to the entirety of the universe. Breath low and slow.

Consciousness permeable to the full spectrum of spacetime. Flexible and purposefully ready, just leap.

There is embodied preparation and worldview pivots that set the foundation for leaping. Of course, the exercise of strategy, casting back from the story of the thriving future, and building the just-enough infrastructure to support a critical mass of intrepids.

And no leap occurs without leaving the safety of what you know and leaning into a constantly changing unknown. Thus, it can be said that leaping is transformative evolution in which there is evolving transformation.

Leaping takes courage, faith, and appetite. Courage is not an absence of fear; rather, it is what we are about in the face of fear and doubt. Courage is “stuff,” frequently quiet, rarely bravado.

Courage is needed to consequentially leap because there are known and unknown risks. Only the foolish have no fear, the Taoist strategist Sun Tzu opined, lamenting at the plentitude of fools. Faith is what we have when we believe in ourselves and what it is we are about, the tangibility of our horizon story (not the probability). We have faith in our fellow travelers, fellow warriors, fellow poets, fellow farmers, fellow cooks on the path we are building together because we are building together. Trust undergirds faith. Or is it the other way around? And if there is no appetite, no desire, no magnetic pull toward that which needs to be done, must be done, then the excitement will be short-lived. Appetite makes perseverance possible, that internal resolve to weather the most confusing and chaotic days without losing our way and ways.

Thus, it can be said that our beingness both precedes and permeates our doingness. (There is, indeed, doingness. Leaping isn’t worth much as a wishful kind of thing.)

My most enthusiastic colleagues habitually accord to this order: Leap! Act! Aim! Allow me to make a case for a consequential shuffling:

• Leap (in our mind, heart, core)!
• Aim (as in strategically and tactically align and orient within and toward the emergent worldview)!
• Act (in a leaping way, discarding the habit of incremental steps, toward that which we aim)!

Redundantly reinforcing-the first leap is indeed one of beingness. And it is closely associated with what and where we are leaping toward. We are more likely to imagine and strategize into an expansive possibility if we first leap in our mind, heart, and core, while interrupting the habit of not committing, not desiring before we know all the details. Without the initial leap, our imagination can be limited to the boundaries of our current possibilities. This facing squarely and leaning into becoming without a hairbreadth interval of hesitation… this is the becoming part of beingness.

A
Frog
Prima
Ballerina
Mighty
Flea
Flying
Squirrel
Excited
Child
We Are
Becoming
What
Where
Why
We
Leap
Toward
Thriving
Yes
Please
Thriving

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