Well, since my last post I have come across a lovely little book that shows how we can live dangerously, despite the growing number of stupid rules, regulations and risk assessments that seem to have taken over our lives. In his funny but thought-provoking little book " How To Live Dangerously: Why we should all stop worrying and start living" Warwick Cairns tells us that if you are worried about someone abducting one of your kids you would need to lock them out of your house every day for 200,000 years before they were taken (and even then you would get them back within 24 hours). And if you are afraid of flying you would have to fly every day for the next 26,000 years to die in a crash - during which time you were more likely to die 20 times over just driving to the airport!
It's also interesting to note that more people were killed on the road in the US a year after 9/11 as a direct consequence of deciding not to fly after the tragedy. OK, these are just statistics. But we need to take notice of them if we are not to spend the rest of our lives staying in bed because we are frightened (and that ain't safe either by all accounts!). Warwick's message is that the world is full of risks and we can't avoid them. We imagine fears where there aren't any and take unnecessary risks when we should know better.
This is Warwick's final piece of advice:
"If you really want to live your life to the full, and if you want to do and see and feel all that it has to offer, then you need to push at your fear, to see how far it will let you go, and when and why and how it will let you do what you want. In return, it will push back on you, and you need to be prepared to give, and to bend to its will. And when it says, "this far and no further" and means it, sometimes you just have to stop, no matter how much you might want to do otherwise. If you do that, in the end you and fear will get to know and trust each other and learn how to rub along together just fine: and at that point you will know what it means to really live - and to live dangerously."
Apparently, 53 people die whilst posting on the internet every year in the UK so I need to get out of here!
How To Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying and Start Living
Warwick Cairns (2008)
Pan Macmillan
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1 comments:
From the author - really interesting to see a review of How to Live Dangerously on a Buddhist blog. I'd never thought of it even remotely as a spiritual book, even though I'm what you might call a 'fellow traveller' - I used to go and see Krishnamurti speak as a teenager, and at university I used to go to the New Haven Zen center twice a week for chanting and meditation, and on Zen retreats in Proidence, Rhode Island. But looking back over what I've written, this passage jumps out at me:
Perhaps at some time in the future, people will look back at what we have done, and how we have chosen to live our lives, and they will shake their heads in amazement. But we can't wait until then: none of us can. There is so much that needs to be done, and so little time left to do it in. When you see the speed at which so much of your life has gone by already, and when you think about the speed with which the rest of it will go; and when it suddenly strikes you, quite unexpectedly, in an unguarded moment - while washing the dishes, say, or pausing a moment, reading in your chair and looking up to see dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight from the window, and the fact of it hits you, the knowledge that the presence of death is all around us, it draws you up short. Life is here and now, and then it is gone.
And, while it is here, fear is here to help us live it.
Warwick Cairns
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