Issue #52: Am I ready to take a risk?

Plus, the joy of making a 'F*ck that' list and why you won't find me on a skiing holiday.

I spent yesterday morning watching video footage of high-speed car crashes. For many people, this would be recreation: Fast & Furious 10 came out this summer, meanwhile the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise reported sales of 405 million copies and counting. However, for me, it was a criminal punishment for driving 24mph in a 20mph zone.

What my National Speeding Awareness Course reminded me of – aside from the futility of speeding in the name of getting to your destination faster; shout out to our lovely course tutor, Laura – is just how averse I am to physical risk. To the extent that I had to look away at the simulated crash videos (there’s a reason I haven’t seen any of the Fast & Furious franchise). While skiing, ice-skating and Roller discos are all normalised pastimes, I’ve given myself a lifetime pass. Rollercoasters, bungee-jumping and sky-diving all feature highly on my ‘Fuck-that list’, Reddit’s answer to the better-known ‘Bucket List’. And, despite my speeding offence, few things give me the ‘ick’ more than careless driving.

Obviously, this risk assessment isn’t meant to be prescriptive for anyone else (aside from speeding part, which admittedly is a little ‘blind leading the blind’). However, for me, it’s a rationale driven by enough life experience to know better – one which frees me up to embrace discomfort in the areas I do care about. Having dipped my toe in adventure sports – a failed Skiing for Beginners course; a scary surf lesson; worst of all, a few terms of mandatory school Lacrosse lessons at a highly-competitive girls’ school – I’ve done just enough to say, you know what, I get the high you’re seeking, but I’m out. Oh, and I’m still terrified of the ball, which I maintain is a solid evolutionary strategy.

Choose your poison

For many, the thrill of these pulse-racing activities is worth the reward. But what I’ve realised is, when it comes to risk, you can both choose your poison and choose the poison you’d like to avoid. This is, incidentally, one of my favourite privileges of adulthood: no one can make me do the stuff I hate. Growing up, you feel like you ‘should’ try everything, from team sports to recreational drugs. In the name of building resilience. In the name of not losing face. This doesn’t count as calculated risk because you didn’t really have the experience to calculate anything in the first place. But, as you come to know yourself, you learn your limits – even if they make little sense to someone else.

Case in point: I was amused to hear astronaut Tim Peake’s admission on the most recent episode of Happy Place that, while he’s happy to keep travelling into space, he’d be much too afraid to appear on Strictly Come Dancing.

‘For me, the prospect of going on Strictly Come Dancing would be completely terrifying, because I can’t dance. Send me to space any day. Ask me to dance in front of millions of people, no way.’

-Major Tim Peake on Happy Place

To the average person, dancing the cha-cha-cha would feel like the lesser risk compared to launching oneself into Space. But Tim draws the line at making a tw*t of yourself in public – compared to the more private process associated with his chosen profession: analysing the risks ahead and preparing accordingly. I think most of us would still choose dancing on Strictly, but each to their own.

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The value of risk

Risk comes in many forms. And, while I won’t be cliff-jumping anytime soon, I seem to find myself seeking another flavour of risk. Earlier this week, at a dinner hosted by the wonderful London Writers’ Salon, Parul, the co-founder, asked us to go round the table sharing two things:

1. One word to summarise our year so far

2. One word to summarise our aims for the rest of the year