Risks and Addictions

I once had a friend who allowed smoking to rule almost every aspect of her life. When she was pregnant, I saw her smoking. She was hired at a job, but on the condition that she couldn't take smoking breaks. The very first day she was fired when she left her desk to smoke out in front of the building. My husband and I struggled through a bad snow storm so that we could deliver Christmas packages to her house. She promised she'd be home all afternoon--but when we called several times (during the era of mainly land lines), we got no answer. Later, she told us she'd run out of cigarettes and had gone out to get more.

She's an extreme example of someone addicted to something that greatly affected her very being. Some ONE can also do this to a person--think of the astronaut who left her children behind to drive hours away to confront her perceived romantic rival.

But some of us are on the other end of the spectrum....we are so low risk, so lacking in the "addiction" gene that sometimes we go through life, as Flannery O'Connor put it, on "neutral." We don't get into a lot of trouble--but then we don't do much of anything at all. We're afraid to try or of making mistakes. We often eat the same foods over and over again. If we travel, it's often to places we've visited before. Even if we pick up the pen to write, we often don't have enough commitment to see a piece to the end.

Somehow it would almost seem ideal if high risk could combine with low risk to create an individual who took calculated, logical risks. Who finished what she/she started, even if it meant making some mistakes. Who walked into a party where she/he didn't know anyone.

Once in a while I've been able to be a risk-taker--when I went to Japan for two years, for example. This experience paid off richly. However, I did try out some perilous roller coasters and I fear them just as much now as I ever did--only I refuse to board them any more. I find I take fewer risks as the years pass--middle age, complacency, fear? Or perhaps I enjoy some stability in a life that didn't always offer a steady path.