risk

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."
~ Katherine Mansfield
(New Zealander short fiction writer)

I've been contemplating risk. It's a fairly nebulous topic, one laced with all sorts of subjective notions: the degree of risk and the inherent danger involved (whether that be physical, emotional, financial, etc.) is dependent on person, place, context, time, mental stabitility, essential feasibility...and so forth.

risk
(noun)
1 : possibility of loss or injury : PERIL
2 : someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard
3 : a) the chance of loss or the perils to the subject matter of an insurance contract ; also, the degree of probability of such loss
b) a person or thing that is a specified hazard to an insurer
c) an insurance hazard from a specified cause or source
4 : the chance that an investment (as a stock or commodity) will lose value
(from Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)

I'll specify, first. I'm not talking physical danger (no skydiving for me, thanks!) or financial volatility (I'll leave that to the guys in my office). Nope. It's emotional risk for me right now; risking my heart, my dreams, my sanity, my complacency, my desire. In short, risking it all to see things change.

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
~ E.E. Cummings
(American poet, playwright, essayist)

Regaining belief in myself was the first step. Now, it's taking the risk, leaping from the edge, tuning out the myriad voices - both externally and those that war in my contemplative brain - and finding freedom in uncertainty. I have learned to face the truth; it's the action part that has kept me hanging back and hesitant. It's the "what if" factor. What if I take a risk only to crash and burn? What if it all falls apart? What if I'm in more pain afterward than I am even now? What if? What if?

But then I found this.

"And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
~ Anais Nin
(Cuban-French-American diarist, novelist)

So I'm going to blossom. Winter is over, spring has arrived, and these buds are going to bloom. The "what if" factor involved in risk-taking will never dissipate entirely, nor should it; but neither will I let it continue to paralyze me completely.

Every step that you take
Could be your biggest mistake
It could bend or it could break
But that's the risk that you take
What if you should decide
That you don't want me there in your life?
That you don't want me there by your side?

Oooooh, that's right
Let's take a breath jump over the side
Oooooh, that's right
How can you know it when you don't even try?
Oooooh, that's right

What If,
Coldplay