What Makes Your Heart Beat the Loudest?

What makes you hear your heart beat in your ears, feel it pound in your chest, and reverberate through your whole body? For me, it would most certainly be doing something that scares the hell out of me. A few of those things to date:

– Getting lost in the Scottish countryside at night
– Starting a new business (now on my third)
– High speed off-road driving through the Mexican Baja
– Scuba diving down to the ocean floor
– Asking my wife Kristin to marry me
– Learning to fly an airplane
– Exploring a haunted, condemned prison in the wee hours of the morning

All of these experiences scared the you-know-what out of me…but I made the choice to do each of them anyway. There’s probably hundreds of other scenarios I could include on this list. But you know what’s funny? The past is no longer scary. Having done something once, we grow, adapt and gain confidence. At least I know I have. The things that make our hearts pound the loudest can come in a variety of scenarios. What are some of yours?

Most recently, as many people know, Kristin & I decided to sell and donate 98% of our belongings and travel the good ole’ US of A. Talk about hearts beating loudly! But as it turns out, it’s really not all that scary…actually…it’s more awe inspiring that I ever could have imagined.

The scariest part so far has been riding out a hellacious thunderstorm in Missouri. That bad boy was damn close to flipping over the Destination Tree world headquarters and the mighty Ford truck that pulls it. But we survived the storm, fully intact.

That aside, I’m realizing more and more with every soul-lighting sunrise over a new, gorgeous horizon, that what scares the hell out of me and keeps my heart beating loudest……… is the very thing that keeps me alive. Without these challenges in my life, I’m fairly certain that I’d wither away into nothing to become part of the living dead. It’s not redundancy, familiarity and conformity that ignites my desire to live but rather change, uncertainty and a rebellious spirit that does. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again…it’s good to do things that scare the crap out of you!

If we shackle ourselves to the same fears over and over again, while choosing the same choices day after day, and always do the same comfortable things, then quite literally, we will become stagnant. Never changing. Never growing. Paralyzed. To those that are okay with this kind of existence, I say god speed and good luck, but that’s not the life for me.

All I can say is that life moves at us pretty fast. But if each of us doesn’t stop occasionally to look fear in the face and laugh at it with a heart-pounding smile, then we could miss life and not even know it.

I don’t know what the future holds for us as we travel this great country together, but I do know we’re ready for it. With our hearts a-pounding and adventurous souls on fire, we’re continuing to head down an unfamiliar path in life. Our hopes are to help make this world a more inspiring place through Destination Tree, while we keep our own rebellious spirits challenged.

In the words of Grace Hanson, I leave you with this, “Don’t be afraid your life will end. Be afraid it will never begin.”

So, from the pine covered mountains of Western Montana, cheers and here’s to scaring the hell outta yourself.

Matt