Up for Anything....

Yeah, that's me - "walking on broken glass"


UFA as in "Up for Anything"... that's the name of Facebook social group I belong to... a group that spawned from one of my Meetup social groups. It's also a motto I embrace... I am pretty much "Up For Anything", with caveat that it doesn't land me in jail or cause irreparable damage to my health. (Disclaimer added for my friend Joe who always raises his eyebrows and asks if "anything" really means "anything". So I guess in my case UFA really means UFAUIIIOU "Up for Anything Unless it is Illegal or Unhealthy".)

Tonight I had an interesting UFA experience. One of the groups I belong to (SLC's Liberal Minded Culture Seekers) held a Confidence/Empowerment seminar. Both sounded like things I could use more of so I decided to attend. The seminar was run by one of the group organizers, who is a hypnotist, so I figured it had to be interesting. The evening started with chat, and hypnosis exercise aimed at building confidence, then we moved to the really interesting event of the evening, an opportunity to walk across broken glass.

That's right, walking across a bin of broken wine bottles, as a "mind over matter" sort of exercise. Elias, the organizer, said he would demonstrate, and offered the opportunity to anyone who wanted to give it try. Wendy said she'd give it a try, and I figured, that since I'm always walking on glass in my glass studio anyway, I'd be game, besides, after all, I am UFA. So we signed our lives away on the legal waiver forms and took off our shoes.

Elias went first, carefully moving through bin of shards. The cracking of glass under his feet was quite audible, after all, it was a bin full of real wine glass bottle shards. Wendy went next, and she too walked through the glass unscathed. Then my turn ... my first though was that I'm not a skinny little thing like Wendy, I have some extra force working against me. This might not be easy. But sure enough I walked through the glass with out even a scratch. After seeing our success, most of the rest of the group decided to give it a try. Not a single cut among us.

The hardest part of the exercise was getting out of the box... standing on one foot, on a bed of broken glass, trying to balance while wiping stuck glass off the other foot, in order to not leave any shards behind on the floor. I'm not sure it really did much in the way of building confidence or empowerment, as it really was more of a party trick, but it was an interesting experience, that definitely gave new meaning to the "Anything" part of UFA!