#140 | Risk and resistance

Oh, take me back to the $8-a-night room in Watamu, Kenya, with Monty. The mosquitos, the bed nets which welcomed them. The terrible internet connection; the absolute lack of Yokeru's customers.

“The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

— Che Guevara

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”

— Mary Oliver

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It's no exaggeration that the most nourishing, rewarding, and exciting experiences I can remember involve leaning into risk. The situations are diverse: having a heavy conversation that had to be had, a step into the economic unknown by starting something new, or saying "oh, hello" when feigned blanking is more comfortable. Each time, sensing resistance to risk and taking action led to good things — great things, by the meagre standards of my life. 

Even so, and sometimes for days or months, I shy away and don't take the confident — unsafe — path that's less travelled and more interesting. How do we learn to fight our resistance to risk?

Risk is perceived and uniquely our own. I still today feel the resistance to handing in my notice at my corporate job in 2017: the sweat, the thump thump thump of my heart. Eyes dilated, presumably, in unknowing excitement. Goodbye, tie with tiny elephants on — poached. One senior partner told me I was making a "huge mistake". Maybe I was? The jitters. No one else felt them, nor could care. But they engulfed my world. (The most significant risks on our journey are small for others, and vice versa).

Moreover, life is change. There is no long-lasting status quo on our path. And all change feels risky; life is full of risk. And we resist. We fight. We feel challenged when leaving our comfort zone, abandoning the known for the unknown. However, when we've breached the unknown, and dwelt in the discomfort for a while, we reflect on what a joy the journey was. As we get further along in our stories, our past struggles become treasured memories: The career and romantic wildernesses we wander through are the landmarks of our lives.

Oh, take me back to the $8-a-night room in Watamu, Kenya, with Monty. The mosquitos, the bed nets which welcomed them. The terrible internet connection; the absolute lack of Yokeru's customers. From today's standpoint, it sounds like a liberating joy. It was a wilderness at the time.

Our appetite for discomfort is equal to our potential for growth. More discomfort? More growth. This is not an entirely satisfying proposition. But, leaning into the pain of getting told "no" in a pitch or by a partner means at least we've asked the question. And 1% of the time, someone will say "yes", and our trajectory will leap ahead.

There is an honesty to being aware of the resistance we feel. If we are unaware and don't feel resistance, we're not putting ourselves out there; we're playing it safe and not living as fully as we might. Here, we can learn from children. Could there be anything more inspiring than a child's first steps? There is a total acceptance of danger — a delight in going through the motions of toppling forward, collecting oneself, and starting again.

Our appetite for risk dries up as we age. Our sensitivity to resistance grows. There are stories we are told in life that we learn and then have to unlearn — perhaps in our mid-twenties or during some dire midlife crisis. From my perspective, the primary, most damaging, and most deep-set story is "the unknown is worse than the known". 

"the unknown is worse than the known"

When we believe this, we wrap ourselves in the comfort blanket of our status quo. We must remember we head into the unknown anyway: Do we have any control over the traffic, AI nicking our job, or who we meet at the bus stop? Nope. 

The expression "the cold wind of the universe" resonates with me, but I can't remember where I first heard it. Sitting glued to our laptops, buried in a book on the bus, or nestled with friends in a pub, we're safely embedded in our own world, sheltered from the winds of reality. But take a moment to straighten your back and look up at the absurdity of existence. The "cold wind" is feeling — sensing — the bleak unknown.

Michael Singer, in Living Untethered, wrote beautifully of the experience. I try to remember this when looking around.

"If it took 13.8 billion years for the moment in front of you to get there, and it took 13.8 billion years for you to end up in front of that moment, every moment is indeed a match made in heaven. Nobody else is standing there experiencing exactly what you're experiencing. Truth is, no one ever did, and no one ever will. That exact moment will never be here again. All moments just keep passing through time and space. You are being given a unique show that took billions of years to create—it's right in front of you, and you're complaining about it." 

And by complaining, we're resisting. We're not letting the unfolding unfold; the happenings happen. We're wrestling with control, grasping the known, and forgetting it's sometimes (or always?) better to jump and seek the unknowable.

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My week in books

One Year On A Bike by Martijn Doolard. This is gorgeous book details Martijn’s cycle from Amsterdam to Singapore. Hot, cold, beautiful and lonely; uphill and downhill, Martijn explores a big chunk of the surface of our planet. Inspiring.

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Live well,

Hector

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