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Creating the Life You Really Want: Stimulating Risk Is Inseparable from Living
By Jeff Willmore Nothing is so reckless as waiting for certaintythats a game we are sure to lose. Anyone who runs a business, chooses a mate, or just drives down the street knows theres a risk. Stimulating those risks is inseparable from living. Our preferences can often tend toward comfort, familiarity, safetybut in opting for those, we often miss out, even to the point of giving up advancement, intimacy, adventure. Well have explanations as to why we hold back, perhaps telling ourselves its easier to deal with what has to be avoided than what can be imagined, created or committed to. While those decisions might have the appearance of freedom, they at the same time can limit whats possible. Among the major themes to which literature repeatedly turnslove, loss, identity, ambitionnone may be richer and more consuming than regret (regret about some lack of action or initiative, regret that we did or didnt express something, regret that we didnt live our lives fully).
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In Becketts well known play Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragontwo hapless fools

wonder how to live, how to move forward. They sit and wait. They wait throughout the entire playfor some kind of sign to go in one direction or another, some kind of guidance or insight, or person or entity that never comes. When the play ends, they have gone nowherethey are where they started. Estragon: What do we do now? Vladimir: I dont know. Estragon: Lets go. Vladimir: We cant. Estragon: Why not? Vladimir: Were waiting for Godot. Estragon: Ah! When we get wrapped up in our circumstances, concerns, and points of view, we can lose sight of whats possible, settle for less, and essentially adapt to things as they are. When the possibility of power, effectiveness, and freedom arises, theres a concern we might not be able to live up to the possibilitya lack of condence. Lack of condence and holding back go hand in hand with the thinking: Is the ball going over the fence? Its not going to go over the fence. Whats worth knowing about that back-and-forthness is that its all a conversationnotions that live in language. Actually, the question of whether something will happen or not is irrelevant to the phenomenon of possibility. There is no certainty as an inevitability, or predictability of the outcomewere the ones saying something is possible, something is not. Something is doable, something is not; something is difcult or something is easy. Creating a breakthrough, stepping out, taking new ground requires disrupting our old conversations. The skill of the twenty-rst century could be said to be the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Unlearning is required when the conversations we revert to no longer work, or the world has changed so completely that they are now holding us back. When we recognize our old patterns, own them, transform them, were able to invent our lives from what could be. Beyond just showing up and living life day after day is the ability to choose and create a future we really want and make the difference were out to make. There is no right place to begin, and we may not know what to do or how to do it, but the pull is there to move what we see or imagine as possible into action. It requires a certain audacity, clarity, and fearlessness. Being alive is an inherently risky proposition. Steve Jobs, Lady Gaga, and David Tench come to mind as just a few contemporary examples of jumping into that risk space, and acting on their vision with no certainty of the outcome. Jobs believed that people with passion can change the world for the better and the people who are crazy enough to think that they can are the ones who actually do. Getting red from Apple, according to him, was the best thing that ever could have happened, as it gave him the freedom to be a beginner again. His belief was that art and commerce, complicated ideas and simple packages, could merge into a universal aesthetic. He put a computer inside a phone, the phone into millions of pockets. He changed lives, dened an era, and is a testament to expanding peoples sense of the possible. Lady Gaga, in an interview about a recent album, talked about the curtain never closing, about nding the you that makes you a champion of life. With her singing talent, social networking, and guts, she redened pop culture and parlayed her popularity into effective advocacy for causes that make a difference. David Tench, a British lawyer, while less well known, irked by the lack of consumer rights, became a powerful spokesperson and catalyst for people standing up to companies and retailers over shoddy products. Governments around the world took up the cause, laws were passed, and here, too, the game was changed. These outcomes were not out there in the circumstances as an independent reality to be recognized either accurately or inaccurately. Rather they were realities that arose in language. Real power occurs when we know we have something to say about the way things arethat we have a voice, that we have access to the state of affairs beyond just reporting on them. If all we can do is report, our access to whats going on is trivial ( la Vladimir and Estragon). When we invent ourselves by our sayingwe begin an excursion into possibility. In Helen Kellers words, Security is mostly a superstition. It does not

exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Creation is a great risk, and a kind of ultimate riskits the willingness to take a stand with no evidence and no propping and no proof. Its hard to provide evidence, or make any real argument for a place where life can show up as a creation, but it is in that domain that the full world available to us in being human can be explored and lived. To be alive is to be at risk, to be free is to be at risk, and to be powerful is to be at risk. See more Landmark Forum leader articles > See stories about graduates making a difference > Back to Landmark Newsletter home >
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