Training wheels get boring quick.  Life is a risky art form.

And yet, even for those of us who are drawn to danger on one level or another, there is also an incredible beauty in feeling safe.  I find it’s practically required in order to go to sleep at night.  

Safety and risk have a rhythm and a balance.

Most of us genuinely want others to have the opportunity to feel safe.  Does that feel true for you?

More challenging to hold, however, is the space for others to experience risk.

We have systematically been removing risk from our cultural norms for at least the period of my lifetime.  Playgrounds when I was a kid had metal slides that towered overhead.  One could actually fall off of them if they weren’t careful!  It was sometimes exhilarating and always humbling to walk up the ladder.  I have no memory of falling children pandemic, yet I rarely see such slides anymore.  Perhaps there was a lawsuit.  Short covered slides came in like a mandatory vaccine.  Nobody is liable for the unknown side effects that removing physical risks from a child’s experiential vocabulary may create.  Similarly, pharmaceutical companies have no liability for the inherent risks of vaccines.  These risks are clear if we look in the right places, but those places are getting harder and harder to find. 

There is no such thing as safe.  No matter how hard we work to create safety and comfort for ourselves we will still have to face pain and death.  Bodies are temporary.  I find I can only transcend this limitation by accepting it wholeheartedly.

This time in our culture is the logical conclusion of an era in which we’ve done away with tall metal slides.  Anxiety has taken control, and anyone who dares disagree with the nature of our predicament is guilted into submission or silence.  Anyone who stands up and says “I don’t feel safe,” or even “I feel this other underprivileged person isn’t safe” holds a trump card:  Every ‘good’ person must bend over backward to save them at their own expense.  Shame is ruling us, and just the way an old slide rusts, this shame is eating away at our collective tolerance for risk.  A few children may fall off a tall slide, but what possibilities are lost when we fail to let children face danger?  The feeling of anxiety that arises while climbing the ladder is part of a healthy emotional ecosystem, and it eases with practice.  The slide is not the problem, and removing it does not make children safe.  

I like to feel safe, yet it’s not my purpose.  I’m here to experience love, sadness, danger, connection, pleasure, and sometimes even boredom.  I’m here to live.  I’m here to send emails that on a good day aren’t quite what you expect.  Doing THAT brings me a much deeper feeling of belonging, integrity, and joy than safety ever could.

The real-world middle ground of saf-er is a constant negotiation.  Control and anxiety come from the same source.  When someone says they don’t feel safe, attempting to bring them safety may deprive both they and you of the practice needed to experience saf-er.  With my rather elementary understanding of physics, I would like to invoke the first law of thermodynamics:  There is no energy created or destroyed in the universe.  Energy just changes form.  Calls for ‘safety first’ can easily trade one risk for another less obvious one.

Want a different way of seeing the ‘virome’ than you’ll find in the mainstream?  Check out Zach Bush.  Here’s a podcast with him that I’ve just been listening to (among others).  He’s an articulate, well informed, practicing scientist and clinician.

Want to further explore the risk of shared social vulnerability?  Check out the BraveSpace Pod Homestay Retreat I’m offering for New Years.  There are still some spots left.  Maximum participation will be 15 people.