4.
TAKE MEANINGFUL RISK
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Author and travel writer Nick Thorpe was used to driving himself hard to meet deadlines and lead the life he wanted. However, as he approached midlife, the strain was beginning to tell. Used to writing about new destinations, Nick was bewildered and terrified one morning when a workaholic breakdown left him in unknown psychological territory.
“I was hunched at my desk as usual, feeling about as healthy as road kill, racing to meet a deadline, when suddenly I found I couldn’t type another word,” he remembers. “My hands wouldn’t do what I asked of them. It was a terrifying experience for someone who had always done everything through sheer effort – because it dawned on me at last that crude willpower doesn’t last forever. It’s a bit like oil. And mine had just run out.”
Even at the time, however, Nick’s fear was mixed with something like relief as he struck out into an unknown territory.
“I basically surrendered, blew some deadlines, let some people down. If I was going to avoid a complete breakdown, I needed to stop bullying myself into action and risk trying another way.”
Nick embarked on what he now recognizes as a spiritual quest. A quest to meet people and situations that could teach him how to stop holding on so fiercely to the certainties in his life. To let go a little. “At the start I took it rather literally. I went cliff-jumping and free-falling on the wings of a biplane. I soon began to experiment with emotional and social ways to let go, including clowning, naturism, and various workshops which encouraged me to make myself much more vulnerable than I was comfortable being.”
Nick didn’t know what the outcome of his risk-taking would be. Looking back, he considers this to be the richest and most transformative year of his life. He learned to trust life more and live in the present. He also took the momentous step of becoming an adoptive dad.
Nick reflects that he was able to take those risks because he had a baseline of safety from which to attempt them. Just as he could only give himself to wing-walking when he knew he had a reliable harness, or try naturism when he knew there was a code that nobody would point or joke, so he realized that his son could only grow when he truly knew that he was safely parented.
Nick admits there are days when risk-taking seems like a big stretch. “I see it in my eight-year-old son, who is like most of us, deep down. Some days we’re safety seekers, other days we’re risk takers, trusting ourselves enough to push boundaries like healthy growing children and see what happens. But what if even our mistakes, our so-called failings, our times of Not Knowing, are simply part of growth?” he asks. “I’ve noticed that when I can believe that, I lose my fear, and I’m open to almost anything.”
The fears and anxieties experienced at the edge may be well founded because the unknown can be a scary place, where our identity, comfort and wellbeing are at risk. The decision whether to proceed cannot be taken lightly. Each one of us must assess the context within which we operate, what the situation is calling for, our own level of tolerance, and the support available to us to ascertain the level of risk we are prepared to take.
