What if you got the perfect Valentine from the most wonderful person in your life? This year, skip the middleman, and give yourself all the love, approval, and appreciation that you ever wanted from anyone else.
In honor of the one you’re with, the only one you’re always with, give yourself a Valentine, a luscious, mushy Valentine. Begin with a love letter to yourself. Here are some things to include:
- What you would secretly love to see published about yourself if someone else was writing a tribute to you.
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I grew up in Miami, where my favorite elementary school field trip was the wonderfully creepy Serpentarium. Even the parking lot was exciting–a mammoth concrete cobra leered menacingly at the cars driving by on US 1.
The owner, Bill Haast, was passionate about poisonous snakes and convinced their venom held the key to medical mysteries like polio and MS. Barehanded, he’d snatch a slithering cobra by its head and wrestle its fangs into a membrane-covered vial, collecting its venom for his experiments. We heard dramatic stories of how Mr. Haast’s blood—transformed into a powerful medicine from the numerous bites he’d endured—was rushed all over the world to save misfortunate snakebite victims.
If you were brave enough, the tour guide would wrap a gleaming indigo snake around your neck. I remember standing in the blazing sun, quivering inside, and proudly stepping forward to volunteer. Standing stiffly, I felt the weight of the snake on my shoulders and gingerly touched it with a fingertip, as goose bumps raced down my arms. I remember how I grinned: I’d overcome my fear, found incredible new courage, and I was elated.
There was a huge python at the Serpentarium, coiled up in a big glass box. It was maybe twenty feet long and fourteen inches in diameter. The guide explained that pythons are incredibly strong. They wrap around their prey and squeeze it so tightly it can’t breathe. Then, they unhinge their jaws, open wide, and swallow it whole.
That python was so strong, the guide said, that it could easily break out of the glass box. But, since it didn’t know that, it never tried to get out, and stayed imprisoned by its own passivity.
I told that story to my kids so many times, that they called it one of my momilies. “Don’t be a snake in the box,” I’d tell them when they were afraid to try something. “Just jump in and do it.”
The Serpentarium is closed now, but I recently read that Mr. Haast is now in his 90s, vigorous, sharp, and working in his new snake lab every day. He regularly injects himself with a venom cocktail which, he says, gave him his long, healthy life. I suspect that living a life of passion and courage has had a lot to do with it, too.
There was way more to learn at the Serpentarium than herpetology, the study of reptiles. Its very existence came from the fearlessness of a man so deeply engaged in his dreams that he lived beyond the rationality and common sense that holds so many of us back.
As children, we got to experience that fearlessness too, as I did that day when, flooded with bone-chilling fear, I stepped forward into the sunshine, allowed the indigo to be placed around my neck, and felt the incredible euphoria of my own courage. And the hapless python was living proof of not stepping forward, not trying: you stay inside your glass box, peering out at life, never finding how easy it might be to break out.
