The Baby on the Bridge: Trust and Belief in Yourself, the World, and Reality

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

I’ve told this story before on my YouTube channel but it’s something that keeps coming up in conversations with clients and friends and so I wanted to put it down on paper (or screen!).

This is a really simple but powerful metaphor but there’s also a relevant and synchronistic story about how I uncovered it that heightens it even more.

I’ll try and keep this short so you can get the point and move on but essentially it goes like this:

One of my first ever memories is from when I was about 3 or 4 years old – it was before my parents got divorced (when I was 6) and it was in our family home in Brighouse, Yorkshire.

For some reason, I woke up in my bed at night and decided that I wanted to watch cartoons – it felt really late to my kid brain but I guess looking back it was probably only about 10 or 11pm.

It was late enough to be dark and everything seemed bathed in blue light but I decided to follow my desire, got out of bed, and clambered downstairs to see what was going on.

On the way downstairs, I remember peering through the gaps in the bannister and seeing that in the living room – across the hallway – there was more blue light being emitted from the TV that somebody was watching.

That was enough for me to keep creeping down the stairs – TVs were where you found cartoons and that was the only thing I cared about right now.

I crept further down the stairs and eventually stood outside the living room door. I knew that I was supposed to be in bed like a good boy and I felt like I was breaking the rules or that trouble was imminent for being awake at such an unholy hour.

For a while, I just stood by the door, building up the courage to go in and disrupt my Dad who was watching sports or something – basked in that blue light in his own world.

I didn’t say anything for a while… Just stood there, peeking around the door in the shadows and wondering what my next move should be.

Eventually, my Dad must’ve sensed my presence because he perked up and asked me: “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to be in bed.”

Naturally, I gave him the only answer that made any sense: “I want to watch cartoons”.

It was at this moment that my Dad thought he had ‘got’ me and that getting me to go back to bed would be relatively simple.

He explained that he was going to flick through the channels (only four of them back then!) and that if there was a cartoon on I could watch it – otherwise, it was back to bed.

I took him up on his offer, confident that I was going to win the deal and be rewarded with some kind of cartoonery.

Confident also that he was going to ‘win’ the deal and banish me back to bed, my Dad started flicking through the channels – no doubt fully convinced that there’d be no cartoons on TV at such an ungodly hour and that he’d be able to go back to his sports in no time.

This is where the ‘synchronicity’ kicked in.

For whatever reason, I just ‘knew’ that there was going to be a cartoon on and there was:

As he started channel surfing, my Dad landed on a cartoon – I let out a satisfied noise and he let out a deflated one. I could feel how surprised he was – his surprise filled the whole room.

True to his word, he now had to let me stay up and watch this cartoon and so that’s what happened.

I’ll never forget it.

The cartoon in question was really simple: it was a blue and white animation of a baby walking in the air across some kind of ravine…

Essentially, the baby was walking from a cliff on one side of the ravine to the other but the catch was that there was no bridge or way across the ravine… Just the baby and his faith in himself and life.

Every time the baby took a step forward, bricks would appear underneath its feet and form a bridge across the ravine.

With every step the baby took, a new part of the bridge would emerge, until eventually it was all the way across the ravine and that was the end of the cartoon.

As a kid, I remember being totally entranced by this cartoon – I have no idea why it was on TV so late at night and I’ve done a ton of Googling over the years to try and track it down to no avail.

I describe this story as a synchronicity because the cartoon itself was a perfect metaphor for what was going on in my mind at the time… I just ‘knew’ there was going to be a cartoon for me to watch, had faith, went with the flow by taking the steps I needed to take (down the stairs and into the living room) and then – against the odds – things just kinda worked out.

Though I didn’t conceptualise it like this back then, I now think of the metaphor in that cartoon as one of the most REAL ways to live our lives:

We can’t always see our next move or next step but – if we have the faith in ourselves and cultivate the capacity to TRUST life – then that next move or step ALWAYS reveals itself and we’ll make it to the other side of that ravine (wherever we’re currently trying to get to in life).

The only thing that really stops us being able to live in this “Baby on the bridge” like manner is our EGO stuff – as soon as the ego gets involved and we start trying to control and force everything then it’s already TOO LATE because the mere act of giving into that stuff means that we have lost faith in ourselves and life.

Being real ultimately means that we know life is bigger than just our ideas about ourselves and that we can’t control everything. All we can do is know where we want to go and then be open enough to allowing the path to reveal itself as we keep going.

None of us can control everything that happens on the way to wherever it is we’re going – all we can really do is CHOOSE to go there and then move with life as it happens and shape it with the steps that we take by responding to the truth that arises along the way.

Even though it’s a simple metaphor and it entered my psyche more than 35 years ago, I think about that baby on the bridge all the time – especially when things are moving too fast around me or I don’t have any obvious answers about what my next move should be or which direction to turn in.

I remind myself to just keep going and to believe that the path will reveal itself and support me to get where I’m going – it does every time… But only if I can maintain that sense of innocence and stop trying to control things and make them happen the way I think they should.

The path is always there as long as we can be present and the only way to do that is to get out of our heads and to TRUST in life.

Think of the baby on the bridge next time you’re in the thick of it and that hamster wheel in your head is taking you off the real path.

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If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

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