1: Microrisks

You know those moments where you’re waiting in line for a roller coaster on the side of a mountain and your six year old cousin is told he can’t go by himself because of how he’s a child and would be zanily flung from his seat before much less zanily landing somewhere in the middle of the woods?

And you know how when he’s told this, he inevitably tries to convince you he’s a big kid, which inevitably leads to any and every adult in the tristate area telling him he doesn’t want to grow up too fast? All of this culminating in a rant about how terrible it is to be an adult?

Well, just as you have borne witness to this, so have I. And I’ve got to say, it was an enormous bummer. Hearing their anti adult list go on and on made me feel like I had to intervene. Had to stand up for this thing we’d all become.

“It’s not all bad,” I rest my hand on my cousin’s fluffy head, “when you’re old, you get to have ice cream whenever you want.”

This perked him up. And the best part is, is that it’s true. Now, I didn’t tell him what ice cream does to you when you get older and the secrets it makes you and your bathroom keep, but clearly that’s not enough to keep us from eating it, so it seemed irrelevant.

This whole interaction weighed heavily on my mind.

Why do we hate being adults so much?

What was it about being a kid that was so superior?

Then I had it, and all it took was a little bit of sisterly love.

See, when riding this mountain coaster, you can control the speed of your car by pushing down on a metal lever. The further you push them down, the faster you go. My sister was happy to point out that my cousin, a child so small he was forced to ride with his mother, pushed his levers all the way down, while I, a thirty year old adult, was trying to see if I could pull them up past full break setting.

This is the real difference. Kids know how to take risks! Granted it’s mostly because they haven’t seen enough of the horrors of the world to know any better, but they still do it, and it keeps day to day life exciting in a way that working the same nine to five job every day does not.

And here’s where we hit the crux of the issue, because there are plenty of people out there telling us to take risks. Telling us to quit our jobs and start that small business. I will never knock these people or there message, but for some of us, these kinds of risks just aren’t feasible, or at least not right now.

So in the meantime, how do we avoid having the kinds of lives we warn children about, like the inevitable witch in every candy house?

What if we just took smaller risks? What is we measured the capacity we had to try something new and different, and made it a priority in our every day life?

That’s my goal with this blog. I want to stop spending my days getting so familiar with a TV show that I can recommend episodes by name. I want to stop getting on my phone when it’s light out and not putting it down until I realized the sun left.

Every month I am going to choose something I’ve wanted to do, but haven’t tried because of my big, dumb grown up fear, and I’m going to actually follow through on it.

I’ll post about my progress here each Monday— which I guess is kind of like risk number one, but I refuse to have a month’s worth of posts about posting, so this doesn’t count.

For my first risk, I’ll be spending September actually editing the book I’ve written, Your Voice or Mine (as seen on my Novel page), so that I can finally have it ready to send it in to a professional editor.

Why is this a risk? This is the first book I’ve written, so the idea of having anyone read it, particularly someone whose job it is to know books, is extremely scary. My plan will be to edit a chapter a day while researching editors that might be available, with the hope of sending it to them by the 30th.

Send me all the best vibes you can, for I am off with great purpose and intention!