There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear. George S. Patton
As my Mum got weaker and weaker (a problem with many causes, some rectifiable), I took to pushing her in a wheelchair along the broad foot-paths around the assisted living facility where she now resides. Apart from the fact that the wheelchair I was able to procure from the facility was such a POS (piece of shit) that the foot braces consistently fell off, it was, at least to me, preferable to sitting indoors with my Mum as she dozed off to sleep again. It seemed to me a win-win. My Mum would get some much needed fresh air and possibly some naturally acquired Vitamin D, and I would not go stir crazy sitting for hours after I had already sat for hours driving up to visit her.
In reality, each journey was plagued with more issues than just the POS wheelchair. Within a block – about 50 to 100 metres – from the facility my Mum would ask to go back. I’d jolly her along for another block, and then she’d ask to go back again. The further we got the more desperately she wanted to go back and the more fearful she became. My Mum was never a dare devil but I once took her on a six day sea kayak trip off the coast of British Columbia and we spent weeks hiking in the Canadian mountains, often off-trail, and camping out. After one visit, I came home and told Doug about the wheelchair expeditions and he muttered something about the irony of being so fearful of death that you stopped living at the point where most of your life was behind you and you had comparatively little to lose.
Young menYoung men and to a lesser extent young women (biology trumps gender ideology) engage in risky behaviour when they have the most to lose and, as they age, with less and less to lose, risk taking slowly (or rapidly) drops away until not taking the latest booster shot begins to seem risky. If you think about it, this is perverse, much like having more time and money when you are too old and sick to enjoy such things. It would make more sense to risk more when you have less life span to lose and risk less when your entire life is ahead of you.
Sunday is paddle day. One day a week I paddle, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. The idea is to keep my paddle fitness ticking over, fairly effortlessly so that if I want to do something bigger I can. Today I had a couple of mates to paddle with, and, as it does, conversation wandered, widely. We talked about adventures and movies, and heart rate monitors, and paddling and training, and death and illness. I was struck again by how subjective and ultimately irrationally we assess risk and how the older we get the more risk averse we become even though we have less to lose.
Risk aversion is really just fear, and a life lived in fear is a half a life. The other half of life is taking some calculated risks, challenging yourself and, most importantly putting aside the endless list of all the things that might possibly go wrong and jumping anyway.
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