Risk
When life slows us down or knocks us down completely, it can be really hard to get back up again and begin moving. In this low, stagnant place, we can become even more stuck by spending all of our time reminiscing about a beautiful past that is now gone forever or trying to forecast the future, which seems scarier and scarier the longer we think about it.
I know that I’ve been stuck in this daunting future since my Dad passed away 14 months ago. It feels like I can’t and don’t want to navigate this new and different life in front of me. I don’t want to travel the world if I can’t send him photos. I don’t want to accomplish new things in my career, write new articles or books, or take new sailing adventures if I can’t share the exciting news with him. It’s terrifying, really, losing your primary anchor in life. I never could have anticipated just how terrifying it would be.
And yet, I know how much my life has contracted over the last 14 months as the painful grief of his death has slowly subsided and, instead of moving forward, I have automatically replaced this grief with an agonizing fear of the future. I know how much my creativity has become blocked, how my engagement with the present moment has become untethered, how my habits of self-care have become erratic, how my life organization has become chaotic, and how my social engagement has dwindled to the point where it’s just me and my avoidance having coffee together most of the time. And even though I know how to “do fear” – even though I’ve become an expert at avoidance, which is just fear wearing a mask – I also now have an intimate knowledge of exactly where fear leads.
Perhaps with every challenge comes an opportunity. They say in business that for every decision you make, there’s an opportunity cost, meaning the benefits associated with all the other options you could have pursued instead of the one you did. What if the opportunity cost of fear is risk? In other words, what if risk is just the flip side of fear’s coin? And what if by keeping the fear side of the coin facing up, we are prevented from taking the very risks that lead us to our own agency?
For humans, I like to think of the “three active A’s of agency”: Acceptance, Appreciation, and Action. All three require a conscious choice, which is why they generate a sense of agency, of making something happen for oneself. And all three require some level of risk. Acceptance means taking the risk of feeling the full emotional weight of a situation and giving up imagined alternatives. Appreciation means taking the risk of saying “this is good enough” and possibly missing out on things that could have been better. And action requires the risk of doing something tangible in real life, a leap of faith which will produce consequences that are always somewhat unknowable. This is opposed to avoiding action, which only requires imaginary consequences and a good dose of internal suffering but no risk at all. All three A’s are scary. And all three A’s are the only road that I know to freedom.
One of my favorite quotes, which is of contested origin, is “He who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.” Lately I feel like I can relate. Stuck in fear, avoidant of all risks, I feel that my life has slowed down to nothing. I’m sick of it, and it has come to the point that if I don’t start taking risks, I could remain trapped here in the nothing forever.
Writing this was a risk. And like every risk, it felt enormous before I actually took it. Creativity is both a risk and its own immediate reward. The mind doesn’t want to acknowledge this. The mind wants to race ahead to the future, to envisage the feedback and other people’s reactions, or to conjure up delusions of what a writing career could one day become. But I am wiser than my fear now. I know that any contemplation of the future is what keeps me imprisoned and what prevents me from writing or creating. I have a life to live right now. Life, when lived creatively, is sweet in the present tense. It needs no past or future. And life in the present tense is simply overflowing with so many other risks, just waiting to be taken. Pick one up, like a Belgian dark chocolate truffle from a box, and take a bite.
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