If there is one slogan which I have come to despise over the last 18 months of the Covid pandemic - obviously I am ignoring the real pandemic which we have conveniently swept aside - it is "Stay Safe." Stay Safe is everywhere, flashing signs by the road side, at my local library, as a convenient sign off to emails, as a daily greeting or good-bye, we are continually exhorted to "Stay Safe."
At the risk of sounding crass, I say "f**k staying safe." I was not born, to live, to die in a safe cocoon. Life within the box in which we feel comfortable is a small and confining place and not somewhere I want to spend my figurative three score and ten.
Which is good, because yesterday we went rock climbing and lead climbing always, unless I am on really, really easy routes, involves at least a small frisson of fear. I have been working on leading this year as in the past I have been a bit of a timid leader afraid of taking even safe falls on well protected sport routes. In my defence, I was always climbing with people that climbed way, way harder than me so I fell and fell and fell all the time and taking all those falls on lead instead of top-rope would probably have broken me, if not physically at least mentally. Remember, I was weak as f**k.
But back to the safety theme, I am also working through attaining Sea Skills under Paddle Australia and as part of that process I just finished reading hundreds of thousands of words so tedious and boring that they would make your eyes bleed. One of the documents is this multi-page, multi-level, stratified, tabulated, cross-referenced, third party verified matrix that you are exhorted to fill in every time you go paddling. I encourage you to click on the link as I find it hard to depict this document in anything resembling a fair description.
I can only assume PA harbours some well paid policy wonks whose entire job is sitting around coming up with policies and procedures that consume entire forests of paper with ideas that could be summarised by "don't be an idiot."
After 40 years of knocking about in the wilderness I feel like I have seen just about everything, including dead bodies, but I have never seen anyone fill in a document like this before heading out to engage in an adventure sport. No-one does this. My own personal opinion is that life in the modern world dredged in toxic sugar, grains and industrial seed oils with inactivity reaching gob-smacking levels is that if we want to assess our real risks we start with what we put on our plates to eat.
Stay Safe, no, actually don't, go take some risks.
We are all born to die - the difference is the intensity with which we choose to live. Gina Lollabridgida.
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