The Greatest Risk

© 1988 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs

Everyone has at one time or another shrunk from a growth opportunity because with it comes the Unknown.  The Unknown!  What’s out there, anyway?

Disappointment?  Derision?  Danger?  Defeat?  Death?

Those are all bad, certainly, but none of them are nearly as bad as nothing.  None of those things can possibly be worse than the horror or Complacency that creeps like a psychic tapeworm into the mind, demanding a steady diet of the bland to let it propagate and infect those nearby.  It’s insidious, evil, and epidemic in America.  It slithers out of TV sets; it crawls from the pages of popular media.  It hides in classrooms and slips unnoticed into vulnerable young brains.

And it does all this while masquerading brilliantly as knowledge and truth.  Complacency is the adulterant of passion, the assassin of curiosity, the lobotomizer of life itself.

A friend’s mother once listened to me talking excitedly about my upcoming journey and shook her head in protective maternal fright.  She summed it all up without even realizing it:  “But honey, there are things out there… there are things out there we don’t even know about!”

Right on.

It’s possible to have growth without risk, but it is growth of the slow, vegetable kind, rarely yielding those magical breakthroughs that make you light up with understanding.  It doesn’t take anything quite so radical as an epic bicycle trip to do this, of course, only the courage to risk the Unknown.  Any kind of Unknown — be it intellectual, geographical, cultural, scientific, physical… whatever.

Because the greatest risk of all is taking no risk.  That’s the one that can really get ya, the death worse than fate.

So.  Curious about something?  Restless?  Hungry for knowledge or change?  Got a dream?

Go for it.