Risk

Risk   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

May 2012 

     There was a medium-sized tree in Kings Park, Perth, in which my friends and I would play. This was a commodious cypress type of tree with thick layers of branches from the top right down to ground level. 

      We’d climb to the top and throw ourselves over, relaxing into a controlled fall as each branch would catch us and drop us to the next branch, and so on to the bottom. It was wonderful. 

I can still smell in my mind’s nostrils the resinous quality of branch and twig and the stickiness that remained on the hands long after we’d gone home.  My body also retains the sensation of the slow supported fall. It is an incredible feeling, this body memory and one that has become something a metaphor for me as I look upon the subject of risk.

      Risk is a chosen action where the outcome is unknown.  Dropping from the top branch of the tree was an act of faith each time, because though we could do the fall over and over, we never quite knew whether we’d catch the branches in a safe way every time. Maybe we’d drop straight to the ground, maybe we’d be all right. Who could really know? 

     Allowing ourselves to partake of risk, allowed us to know life exquisitely. The Brazilian mystical author, Paulo Coelho describes it this way, “You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.”

      Too often we tremble at the edge of existence, too scared to choose, too scared to do anything.  So we repeat the same tired old formulas over and over, even though the circumstances that gave rise to them years ago are no longer relevant.  I’m thinking of a man who I once saw who would not take a holiday from work even though he was completely worn out, to the degree that he was physically ill. Turned out that when he was a child his father had been injured in a war zone and was largely bedridden until death, and mother wasn’t coping. Sometimes she could help; sometimes she just took off. The only child, the boy felt he had to hold it all together. So set the pattern of never allowing himself rest – even long after that difficult childhood, even though his life situation was completely different. He now lived comfortably, with his own grown up family, and a business that employed lots of other people who could run it well without him always present. Yet he still could not let go of his anxiety, he never rested. His family were exasperated. He’d sent them on holiday regularly each year, but always stayed at home to look after the business. What if something happened when he was not there? It was ironical that he could take risks with his business, but not with this essential thing of allowing rest. It was killing him.

     As time goes on the old patterns of dealing with the world get encrusted like an old car battery that hasn’t been cleaned. Gunk just accumulates around the vital connections and we lose our wherewithal to act freshly and decisively. Just the thought of doing something new, to leap into the rich field of unknown possibilities feels constrained by a mounting list of imagined things that can go wrong. What if? 

     “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” Accompanying every act of life is the possibility of annihilation. The spectre of death is always present, a figure that brings all the more shimmer to life. 

      What if the leap ends in stars? Concussion, magic, entrance into an entranced state, paralysis, crippledom, surprise, wow!, feeling incredibly, vitally alive? What if the leap is beautifully supported all the way to the ground, like the cypress tree of my youth? Who knows! Life is risk. The very nature of life can hand out anything – and does.  Plunge into it.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell