adulthood, imagination, and taking risks

A big misconception about being an adult is that nothing is worth risking your pride or stability over--or, worse, that the important things are the ones that benefit from avoiding risk. This is actually backwards--you have to take risks in order to find those things that are worth risking it for, or you never will. I just try to get better--which includes making mistakes.

Risks are the only way you end up learning what is worth risking for, and what is not. And so with each lesson it becomes easier to think you shouldn't risk at all, that you've suffered your losses and it is time to move on, settle down, stop worrying, when in fact it is these losses that hold your inner life, your spark, the new beginning of the person you are about to be. That person will risk better, or just differently, even if you don't know what's "right," and your sense of discouragement from prior risks, even despair, tells you that the sense you have of "rightness" seems to diminish or retreat each day. That internal compass lives within you, always. Each moment of listening to it, each instance of indulging its curiosity, and each impulse toward nurturing its carefulness, can make you more alive. I have never graduated from this process.