Taking Risks

During the past three months, as I’ve turned attention to some personal work on myself, as a growing sense of self-understanding has unfolded, it has become clear I have not been a risk-taker.  I’ll not unburden my heart is this public space, but suffice to say there have been enough disappointments and painful events that one finds it rather simpler to mitigate risk.  And by mitigate risk, of course I mean avoid it wherever possible.

The illusion, of course, is that avoiding risk is even possible.  It is not.  But we are so used to the habitual, the routine, that we do not take into account the sort of risks we face in simply rising from bed and going about our day.  Risks of falling and injuring oneself, even resulting in a permanent disability.  Risks of dying in a car accident.  Risks of being a victim of a violent crime.  Risks of being struck by lightning.  We are only aware of these dangers when they draw near to our circle of daily activity.  We drive past the car accident on the highway. We stumble but catch ourselves on the stairwell, and limp slightly at the ankle that turned just so.  We see on the news that gun-toting man holding up the convenience store we had just left ten minutes before.  Without getting in to the politics or medical back and forth, at the core of our public response to the coronavirus during the past year and a half is the question as to whether and how much risk we are willing to face.

This notion of risk is, for me, at the heart of writing.

For a good deal of my life, I have not been much of a risk taker.  Even if one brackets the life experiences of the past thirty years, and goes back to my high school and college days, I played it safe.  In high school, I turned down an offer to be an exchange student to Germany.  In college, I only once (if recollection serves) submitted something I’d written for publication or contest.

This is not to say that I did not, on occasion, venture into the unknown.  In high school, I attempted to learn how to barefoot water ski.  In college, I composed an original poem, took the subject of the poem to a bench by a nearby creek, and read it to her.  (No date was forthcoming from that encounter, though I might have wished it.)  And on another occasion, after mustering my courage, I did ask a young woman on a casual date.  She said yes.  We did not date seriously, but we are friends to this day.

But when it comes to writing, this I have kept hidden and secret for nearly all of my life.  Occasional writings photocopied and given to family at Christmas.  Poems written for birthdays.  A submission to a contest more than a decade ago.  More recently I shared the draft of my novel to some volunteer readers for their feedback.  But that’s pretty much it.

There’s a reason for this.  As a young boy in grade school, I had worked up the courage to share a story I’d written.  The person I shared it with took notice of a word I had used to describe the hero.  They questioned the use of that word.  It was clear to my young mind that I had done something wrong, immoral, something of which I should have been ashamed.  It was a wound of the heart, and a wound in a very special and tender place of the heart.  All my life one of the greatest joys I have is writing.  That deep and essential part of me had been called in to question.  As a man several decades older, I could have handled that encounter much differently.  As an eleven or twelve year old boy, it was a soul-marking event.

Without doing public therapy in this blogpost, suffice it to say, there were similar encounters on many other matters I encountered growing up.  I naturally grew to be risk averse. Played it safe.

One cannot be a writer and be risk averse.

Every session of writing, sitting at the keyboard, or pen in hand with open journal, one takes a risk.  Is this idea sound?  Will I find the words to express it?  Will I fail to complete it?  Will the reader understand?  Will the reader quit reading?  Is it good enough?  Is today going to be another day of futility like yesterday? Will anyone publish this?  Will the Muse show up?

But what is risk?  It is not, as I have so often treated it, a matter of life and death.  It is not even a matter of existential identity.  Risk is always simply a trade.  We trade the known—sitting down to write as we have done dozens and hundreds of times in the past—for the unknown—the experience of participating in the energies of creation, to touch (again?) the Face of Beauty, Goodness and Truth, to be in action what we are in essence, creatures who create, persons made in God’s image.  Or, less grandly, we trade the effort of a half hour, an hour or two, for the satisfaction of the work we have done, and maybe, even also the knowledge of the joy of our reader.

If I take no risks, I lose very little.  I have traded next to nothing.  But if I take no risks, I lose a great deal.  And I have traded only a little bit.  Some effort of a morning before work.  The disappointment of failure.  A little something bartered for something so much greater.  Yes, even, if mercy grants it, an encounter with the Creator of all.

It is going to be necessary to remind myself of this often.