Bending the Line to Breaking Point

What is a life lived without risk?

I find myself returning to this question more than I probably should, or perhaps exactly as much as I need to. What would it feel like to live between safe, straight lines — to stay inside the boundaries of the acceptable and the predictable, and never once bend the line to see how far it goes before it breaks? I genuinely don't know. I have never been able to find out because something in me has always reached for the bend before the thought was fully formed.

I wonder sometimes what the past would have looked like if I had chosen differently. How it might have turned out. But I suspect that thought is mostly passing curiosity rather than real longing — because the simple fact is that I would not be here, doing this, becoming whoever this is, if I didn't require the risk. The straight lines don't feel like safety to me. They feel like constraint. Like the acceptable everyday pressing in from both sides, slowly and politely, until there is no room left to breathe.

Or maybe I am wrong about all of it. Maybe that is exactly why others seem more easily happy — because they found something in the straight lines that I have always been too restless to look for. Perhaps the difference is imagination, or the particular lack of it that allows a person to be content with what is already there.

I don't have an answer. I'm not sure I want one.

As for the risk currently circling — do I take it, or let it pass? I will have to get back to you on that.

Today's training, meanwhile, offered its own smaller version of the same problem. A direction error discovered in the new form — nothing catastrophic, something that should be correctable tomorrow, but frustrating in the particular way that finishing a form facing entirely the wrong direction is always frustrating. You have done the work. You have moved through every step. And then you look up and find yourself pointing somewhere you didn't intend to be.

Perhaps that is why risk has been on my mind today. The body working out in movement what the mind is still turning over in thought.

Who knows. Who cares. It is time to kiss the day goodbye and look forward to righting the wrongs of today, tomorrow.