For about a year now I’ve had an unpleasant rash on my forehead.
I have a back that packs up from time to time and a shoulder that periodically keeps me awake at night.
My right ankle is a bit shonky from getting kicked playing football against Stockwell YMCA and then falling downstairs onstage during a performance of Calamity Jane at the Battersea Arts Centre many years ago.
Now, I fret occasionally that these things will compromise my ability to do stuff: my shoulder will stop me climbing; my ankle will stop me running; my manky forehead will stop me going out without a bag on my head.
And the more I fret, the more afraid I am of failing, and the less I do.
Which is embarrassing really because the studio today has been full of amazing people who really can do stuff.
Joel Dommett, who can really make people laugh.
Todrick Hall, who can really dance.
And Stephen Roachford, who can can really sing.
(And, of course, Todrick can sing and Stephen can dance.)
But I wonder if occasionally, because they are real human people as well as superstars, they find themselves stopped from doing things, as I am, not by any real incapacity but by the fear of failure.
We get stage fright; we get heckled; we get injured and lose confidence. We start to define ourselves not by what we can do but by what we can’t.
In the Bible, when David goes to fight Goliath, everyone worries about what he can’t do: he can’t win because he’s too small.
So they put him in armour that’s too big with a sword that’s too heavy. And David says ‘I cannot walk with these’. But he doesn’t focus on that. He thinks, ‘I have killed lions and bears and I can take down this giant’. And he does.
Often we need to be reminded that what we can do is more important than what we can’t: by the boy David, or by the incredible Tanni Grey Thompsons and Frank Gardners of this world, for whom physical capacity alone does not determine capability.
Because I reckon that we are made with an astounding capacity to do amazing things, irrespective of aching shoulders or shonky ankles. Or even the fear of failure. Take it from the man with the manky forehead.
Since writing this I’ve done my ankle again, this time running in Dulwich Woods.
The image is a detail of Donatello’s bronze David, most likely made in the 1430s to the commission of the Florentine patrician Cosimo de’Medici. In time it was to occupy a column in the cortile of the Palazzo Medici in the Via Larga, and then to be appropriated by the Florentine state after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494.