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Talking with @nonameslefttouse through a few comments about risk, security and the like, I was reminded about how even though for most of my life I have "played it safe" it hasn't stopped me being exposed to negative outcomes in my life, especially around illness. It also hasn't meant that I have had good outcomes, for instance financially, as that has been an issue too.

For me over the last several years, I have been trying to break from my relatively conservative approach to parts of life and explore them at more depth, which has been highly uncomfortable, but also rewarding. It has also come with a lot of failure and led to mess.

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23vsDf19RmN9eF63CTUtSbpDbjCSTjtRfoTrficgSG8XnvykNFKNoTRcE9BpgxnxcqAvc.jpg)

I have never been the person that wanted to be in the spotlight and I'd sooner walk away from drama than take part, but as a result, it has meant that I have missed opportunities to take because it all just seemed too hard to be involved, too difficult - *not in my nature.* 

But what is *my nature* but the way I behave? And I am a human with the propensity to evolve myself in the directions I choose (at least to some degree), my nature can and will change, even if I don't choose to change it at all. This is because we are subject to our environment and no matter how much we fight or deny it, we are going to be influenced by our surroundings and the people we surround ourselves with.

My own cautions in life are likely born from my childhood and having to take responsibility for myself at a young age. If I wanted to eat, I would cook and if I wanted clean clothes, I would do the laundry. However, what this means is that from a very young age, I also understood the consequences of my decisions and without the backup or safety net children *probably* should have, it meant that it was easier to be conservative and risk-averse, because when something did go wrong, I knew I would be the one to have to sort it out, knowing I also didn't have the resources to absorb errors.

This was a good thing in many ways, but as said, it didn't help me avoid poor outcomes in life and when for example I got chronically ill at 16 years of age, it was far easier to take the "why me?" position, because I felt I didn't deserve it, as after all, I had done *everything right* and I had done most of it by myself in relatively adverse conditions. This had me questioning many things in my life, but still, I played it safe.  


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23xLFPwVurqVCv7XNLKkJ1A8o5tn46v7xXk6WzxVzTGKh4QkTW7HHn8J5edzvTAchAyZz.png)

In many ways, playing it safe might be the riskiest thing to do, because it ends up being a "comfort position" and that comes from the familiar. This means it is far more likely to keep doing what was always done and even though it seeing worse results, there seems more risk in stepping outside of the comfort zone and trying something else. 

So, there is a increasingly fast degradation that will *force change* and when change is forced, it is never met well, it is railed against, rejected, resisted - even though there is an inevitability to the outcome. *The comfort zone is dead.* But, have I ever been comfortable at all?

And this is the question to consider because while I think I have felt the comfort of living life on defaults, the conditions have rarely been comfortable, ironically, because of the default behaviors I applied to life. For example, I have always shied away from investing because felt I never had enough to put in and feared losing it. As a result, I never had enough to lose and my default was a hand to mouth existence that I *suffered.* While comfortable in behavior, I didn't enjoy the outcomes of my behavior *at all.* Yet, there I was frozen for literally decades.

Life is funny, isn't it? We think we have control and every decision is the best we can make at the time, but we really have very little influence over what we experience and most importantly, the changing environment in which we experience it. This means that optimization is impossible, because we do not know all of the conditions at any moment in time. So, me "playing it safe" was not that at all, it was me *feeling like* I was playing it safe - a trick of ego. 

In reality though, despite my comfort in default behaviors, I was on the edge all the time, constantly moving without a safety net of any kind and when things did go wrong as they inevitably do, it would crush me down just a little more and that familiar feeling of "why me?" would arise - a useless position that will yield no answers, but make it harder to deal with the situations at hand.

I don't know when or why it changed or at least, I am not going to explore those right now at this point, but I am glad that I am willing to consciously take more risks, because I can then also consciously calculate them. This means that rather than being a passive passenger on the ride, I get the chance to learn a bit more and look over the edge before deciding to walk along its length. 

Failure is still makes a constant appearance, but it doesn't come with the sense of it is undeserved, it is just a part of the process and a part of life that makes us consider what we are doing and whether, we should keep going or take another path. 

There are so many paths through this life. 
At the end of the day, does it matter how we get to the end?

Only to us as the individual perhaps.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]



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