Risk Meets Exploration: Sexy Bedfellows?
Risk Meets Exploration: Sexy Bedfellows?
Yes, it’s a scary combo. Are you up for it?
By Cindy Yantis
Yes, it’s a scary, sexy killer combo. Are you up for it?
When I pulled an inspiration word card recently, these two were stuck together. Exploration and risk. Are they meant to be linked? The two words often appear together when talking about science, business and space: Exploration and the risk assessment thereof.
It got me thinking about how a marriage between the two ideas offers an interesting allegory for life.
Exploration
I think of exploration as a road of discovery. Forging around corners of the unknown. Being open to newness. Trying things on for size. Dipping into an experience before fully committing. Digging deep in the microcosm of a thing and then connecting the dots and meaning therein.
So, an explorer? An explorer is a seeker, a questioner, a non-settler. Can an explorer ever really be settled, or are they not happy unless in the field of exploration? Always looking around the next bend?
Risk
Risk on the other hand, to my way of thinking, takes exploration to the next level. To safely explore is coloring within the lines. Certainly nothing wrong with that, although often the outcome can be rather beige, or smaller than desired.
Risk Plus Exploration, Sittin’ in a Tree…
However exploration with risk, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, skating on the edge of discomfort, where a choice made could be dangerous in terms of success or failure, yet doing it anyway: that’s risky exploration and is about being truly alive.
Risk-takers often jump without a net, the ultimate in self-trust. They dance in the precipice between staying small and living large.
The time that comes to mind in my life — when risk courted exploration — was when I made the big cross country move from Michigan to LA to pursue the arts. I had never lived more than three hours from home and I was leaving my comfort zone and everything I knew to forge and explore the bumpy road of discovery. It felt like a big risk because I was heading into the unknown in a much bigger way than I’d done before. I could fail, fall flat on my face. But, I went anyway and it was such an exciting, temperature-raising time in my life. It was a thrilling courtship.
Risk doesn’t have to be through grand public gestures. Internal risk involves leaping outside of our comfort zone. In fact, the switch often has to happen there, internally, before the great things transpire in our world.
Within greatness, exploration and risk abide.
The pillow talk between these two bedfellows is passionate and limitless and at times volatile, volatile only in terms of their mutual vibration, vibration that pushes them beyond what or who they were before.
Surrendering to this powerful marriage means to continually step up, to grab onto exploration and risk. Then go, simply go. It’s momentum and marks the powerful agreement that this undeniable nuptial demands.
Now that’s a tête-à-tête I want to be a part of. I’ll even share the pillow.
Related:
Pick a Lane! Follow the Road, Baby
Living in the Space of Possibility
Originally published at www.thoughtchangerblog.com.