REsources for Living
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What’s the riskiest thing you’ve ever done? Jump out of a plane? Travel to a foreign country? Ride a bike downhill with no hands? Change jobs? Make friends with a stranger? Swing upside down on the monkey bars? Tell someone you love them?
Life is full of things that feel risky, and of course what feels dangerous to one person might feel totally ordinary to another. You might feel completely at ease up in a hang glider, but terrified to talk in front of a crowd. Or you might be petrified at the thought of going into a dark cave, but perfectly comfortable climbing to the top of a tall tree.
Luckily, most of the time we’re able to make choices about what risks we’re willing to take. We can weigh the options, and decide whether it’s worth it to go someplace where we don’t speak the language or if we want to take the big jump off the high dive. Everybody needs some level of excitement and the thrill that comes with pushing your boundaries and trying something new. But everyone also needs to feel safe, like they have some measure of control over their lives. And each person has a different point at which life feels exciting, but basically safe. For some people, just walking out of the door in the morning feels riskier than they would like.
That’s where it gets tricky. It’s a lot more pleasant when we get to decide what risks we want to take and what feels like too much. But lots of times we have to do things that feel risky and uncomfortable without getting any say in the matter. If your family moves across the country—or even to a different country—you’re going to have to go to a new school and find a new set of friends whether you’re happy with taking that risk or not. If you’ve been married for 50 years and your spouse dies, you don’t get a choice whether to take on learning how to live life in a whole new way. Companies often have people who are in charge of “risk management,” but the truth is that sometimes you get to manage your risks and sometimes you don’t.
In those times when you don’t get to manage your risks, the only thing you can do, other than to just keep trudging forward, is to lean in towards the things that make you feel secure and at home. You may have to make new friends in a new place, but you probably can still call or text or Skype your old friends. You may have to learn how to do your own taxes for the first time, but there probably are friends or professionals who can help you. And there will probably also be times when no one else can get you through the risk you need to take, when you need to find a deep security inside yourself.
I know that’s easier to say than to do. And I know it’s easier to find security inside yourself if all your life you’ve had people around that you could count on, who taught you that the world was basically a safe place. But at some point each and every person is going to have to learn to act from a place of trust inside. Now, I’m not someone who goes in for sayings like “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Sure, everything happens for a reason, but sometimes it’s a really terrible reason, like people being greedy and cruel.
And often things happen for reasons like gravity or genetics, which are not bad in themselves, but can produce some truly awful results. I can’t believe that God would be out torturing strong people by giving them extra burdens to bear, and I’m pretty sure that people get more than they can handle all the time, but they do their best to get through it, because what other choice do they have?
So I’m not saying that you should trust in the universe because everything is guaranteed to come out right in the end. I’m saying that you should trust in the universe, and in yourself, because you belong, because in this interconnected web of life you are never alone, because in this interconnected web of life what you do and how you do it matters in ways that you may never see.
I’m saying that the deepest security, the one that can carry us through all the chosen and unchosen risks of life, is that we are a part of something much larger than ourselves—not something that guarantees that we will be safe, but something that guarantees that we matter.
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