Risk

A woman, eight and a half months into a complicated pregnancy, is driving to the hospital for an ultrasound. The sun is in her eyes, and perhaps she is distracted, perhaps only temporarily blinded. She fails to see the elderly woman in the crosswalk.

At once: a thud/ hard braking/ a sudden eclipse of the windshield followed by a slow, sick roll as an inert form falls to the ground. Shock, repulsion and brisk emergency logistics. A few days later, as the driver enters the final weeks of her pregnancy, the elderly woman has a stroke in hospital and dies.

On the other side of town, another woman is packing her life in boxes. She was born in this place and lived here with varying degrees of happiness for over four decades. With her son now gone to university in another city, she decides it is time for her too to leave. Within a month, she secures a new, lucrative job in a distant place and is leaving her hometown tomorrow for the unknown.

Two stories, seemingly unconnected. Or are they?

Let me pitch the convenient first: chance occurs randomly, whereas decisions are what we reach. One is beyond control, the Fates weaving the cloth and dropping stitches like tipsy old church-ladies. The other, or so we think, is about taking control and directing the pattern of our lives (me, I like a nice bold houndstooth this season).

But that’s just the pitch. We all buy into that distinction on the surface to make life easier, tolerable, even, especially when faced with horrible situations and bad things happening to good people, etc. But here, Dear Reader, let us entertain the notion that the two are not really that different. Let us venture that they are, in fact, two branches of risk management: the passive and the active.

Risk lurks in every moment. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, an undercurrent of risk lies beneath every chance encounter or sober decision. It doesn’t matter if the water appears calm on the surface. Risk can reach up with casual malice and pull you down. At least a surface flaunting its eddies and rips prepares the swimmer for what could, might happen.

So what to do? One strategy is to compartmentalize risk as a control measure, a neat Bento box of premeditated choices. For example, some pursue adventure in extreme sport or gaming while settling consciously into romantic complacency or routine work. Others may mistake following the norm as the safe choice. Upon reflection, what can be riskier than marriage or having children or yielding one’s long-term economic fate to an employer?

I don’t know if compartmentalizing risk really works. It can lead to an almost schizophrenic division of self, for which I haven’t got the intellectual stamina or emotional detachment.

I’d rather commit to a course of action across sectors, and judge the investment based on the long-term returns. A diversified portfolio, so to speak. (Allow me a derisive snort at myself for choosing this metaphor, as I know nothing about finance and am abysmal at managing even my own money. A ha! for Gretchen, please.)

Take friendship, for example. Making a friend is an easy gamble, a roll of the dice. But holding onto that friend over time increases the risk exponentially, as knowing one another’s flaws—we try so hard to keep them covered, isn't it heart-breaking how cute we all are—is both a gift and a responsibility.

Intimacy is risk. People break, cleave off in directions we can’t fathom or follow. But imagine how impoverished life would be without strangers who learn to love one another, with no suitable anthropological explanations of blood ties or financial gain. Friendship is a pleasant puzzle.

As for Love, I’m hardly the one to speak intelligibly of its risk, but of course I’ll try.

Part of my hesitation to wax poetic on the subject stems from being quite sure I’ve never been in love. Part of my persistence in addressing the subject is being quite sure that the opportunity to fall in love may finally be upon me, if I let it (and don’t fuck it up royally, meows the inner frightened kitten. See: risk. I haven’t forgotten tonight’s topic).

I have peculiar orthodoxy around the term “in love”. I don’t buy the Romeo and Juliet version; though it’s lovely, it also seems giddy and immature. Chances are if they had calmed down they would have eventually glided into boredom and broken up.

My checklist for Is This Love? includes feelings and sentiments that are returned; that leave a lasting impression even after the relationship dissolved; and which has me acting in such a way I can respect in the present and in retrospect.

Instead, in my past I see a series of relationships based on unsatiated lust, on longing for things still unknown to me, on base insecurity and convenience and yes, even genuine human affection. But nothing that could endure, and nothing that was based on equality. And nothing, though I’m sure I was in feverish rictus of emotion at the time, that leaves a strong enough memory for me to really give a shit about the people in my past.

More often than not, I was the one to call the end, but there were a couple of notable exceptions where I was the one to act more badly. A frantic little dog throwing itself against the fence: am I trying to drive you away or attract your attention?

Now, I am open to falling in love as long as it doesn’t impede my own progress, my own sense of worth. This new and dare I say good qualifier sets strict and pleasant limits. These limits hold a welcome appeal to me, similar to shopping in a communist country: my choices are either this one or nothing. This one, luckily, is amazing upon early inspection—but I’m finally at enough peace with myself that walking away with nothing is pretty damn good too. All I can do is aspire to become a person I’d want to fall in love with.

So to end on the theme of risk: do we have a choice in what happens to us? I do not know. The greatest risk appears to me to let fear and cowardice and an excess of prudence govern us. All I am sure of at this moment is that that life is a gift of great mystery and exquisite proportions, and above all is here to be relished. So go get it.