Risk — Sheila Winter Wallace

What a time to be alive! So many of us have spent our lives afraid to take a risk into any unknown, if we even believed that we had choice to do so or not. We did have choice; however, most of us didn’t believe it. Truth is, the phrase, I didn’t have a choice has for ages been the mantra expressed for NOT leaping into an unknown potential. We were looking for safety, for the familiar, for sanity.

Now, I believe, the reverse is true; we are at greater risk of losing our minds if we stay with what we have always known and believed was safe, familiar and sane. Those days are over. The risk to our well being lies in forgetting ourselves and not remembering who we are as quantum biological human beings with the power of choice. Family systems dynamics, government authorities and media forces are engaged in the relentless pursuit of ensuring that we believe we are anything but that, such that it makes it easy AND dangerous for us to forget our inherent magnificence. In that, we sabotage our connection to our Selves and others.

Price Pritchett suggests in his book You2 [You squared], we can choose a different set of risks. Here is what he has to say:

The risks hit you as rather apparent, and may be quite threatening, but you must stack them up against the hidden risks you accept when you decide to live with the status quo.
Ask yourself what you’re risking if you do go for for the quantum leap. The risk is that you won’t really get what you want out of life.
You’ve got to understand that you can never escape risk. It’s not something you can decide to live with or without. Something is always at stake. You can only decide which risks to take.

All meaning in our lives is context dependent. How do you define risk? Is it safe or is it dangerous for you? Think about it. If I want to ‘fit in’ to feel safe, what am I giving up? Autonomy for compliance? If I want to live by the truth of my personal experience, what am I giving up? ‘Fitting in’ the pruned garden, rather than standing tall in the wayward wind? It is a choice that only each one of us can make.

Ultimately, if we are going to really LIVE on purpose and out loud, so we can hear ourselves breathe over the constant hum of expectation to stay quiet, we must choose a very different set of risks. In this case, what could present as risk to you in the presence of external forces is choosing to shift your paradigm for thinking from ‘figuring it out’ to, instead, trusting your body to lead by following its native power to intuitively communicate with you. While it is how we humans have naturally designed ourselves as quantum biological beings, still it is not how we have been educated to live. To live that natural and authentic expression of SELF in the presence of external forces which proselytize otherwise may feel risky in certain contexts at first. However, continually choosing to live authentically, no matter what, ultimately supplies the continuity of real joy that is rich and lasting, even when the proverbial ‘shit’ is hitting the fan, outside of us.

So, is there a risk to choosing to live authentically? To hearing yourself breathe? To being your Self, to listening to your own voice and speaking your truth? To living your life on your own terms, in your own way and in your own time? (It actually sounds heavenly doesn’t it?). Depending on how ‘at home’ one is feeling in oneself, the answer could be Yes, it could be No. There is risk in not allowing yourself to know and feel differently. Therein lies the quantum leap!

If you are choosing to NOT play the game that is your life by external rules, you’ll leave the status quo behind. That could mean a change in family, friends, the life you lead, the work you do. Are you up for it? At all logical levels of thinking, how much is it costing you to not attend to your own life as a model of the personal truth you wish to BE in your world? What if living that truth ensured your safety and your sanity in a new way that could become familiar, safe, and sane? I believe that is a risk worth taking, worth living.

Choice. It IS always, in all ways, a choice. Will you risk the unexpected to BE, DO and HAVE it?

‘If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult.’ Heraclitus, 500 B.C.

Read another way, if you do not expect the unexpected, you will not experience it. Life lives in the unexpected, so expect it and celebrate it with open arms. You might change your mind about risk, no risk. As I recently shared with a friend, ‘Life lives intuitively in the space of the illogical’. That way, you’ll never have to find it. That way, it IS easy, even when it is not.

Thank you for reading.