The elephant in the room is that I went ax-throwing when I was in Chicago last weekend. It was my friend Stacy’s fault. She is always looking for new, fun, out of the box things to do, and she knows I am willing to try almost anything. When she suggested this I thought it was a joke, until I got the receipt she had bought the tickets. With our friend Carrie, the three of us giggled on the train as we made our way there, nervous, unsure but determined not to be the one who chickened out.
When we got to the event we were put on a team with a group of young Muslim women. The opposing team was a tech company having a bonding experience. You could tell some of them had done it before because they were good. The worker, who was hysterical (funny), coached us in how to throw the ax with maximum efficiency, and then we played three games. One was simply which team got the most hits, then a game where you added up the score to exactly 31 and then it was an elimination game to end it. I have to say while I wasn’t that great, I did hit the target a number of times.
I am competitive, but I don’t consider myself violent. My friends and I are practitioners of nonviolence, so the whole throwing a weapon thing was like this guilty pleasure, we couldn’t stop laughing about it all evening. There was something physically quite satisfying about hitting the target. It felt powerful.
But much more fun was cheering for everyone, even the other team. Giving high 5s as the young women we were with explored being strong and powerful. Laughing when everyone inevitably did something humorous. I hit the floor several times. It was the bonding that really made the evening, the shared experience of doing something out of the ordinary and taking pictures of it.
What I realize in retrospect is that the power didn’t come from the ax. I don’t have the ax now, it was just a moment. It came from believing that we were strong, bold and daring. Those are the qualities that will get me through the next crisis in my life, not a weapon. Because of that moment, we were able to believe in ourselves a little more, gain some confidence, and possibly scare our children. That made it well worth it.