An excerpt from David duChemin’s A Beautiful Anarchy.
There are no guarantees as we head into the unknown. There can’t be. If you want to create something new, whether that’s a novel or an unconventional life, there is no getting around the risk, and anyone anywhere that sells you something using the word “risk-free” is lying. There is always, always, a risk. Risk of doing. Risk of not doing. The question is not whether or not there is a risk, but what the risks are.
A friend of mine has always been risk-averse. Now that I think about it, many of my friends have been. They don’t travel. They don’t quit the jobs that are quietly killing their souls. They don’t step out and follow their dreams of becoming a musician, or novelist, or that guy that sells his house to sail around the world. It’s too risky. Too risky? Life is risky! And lest you think selling your house and sailing around the world is risky, how about the risk of not doing the one thing you’ve dreamed of since you were seven years old reading The Kon-Tiki Expedition, and dying with regrets instead? How about the risk of teaching your children that following your dreams is less important than remaining safe, going to college, and dying unfulfilled? Sure, there’s a risk in taking your kids out of school and teaching them yourself while you travel. But is it greater or worse than the risk of leaving them in a class of 30 other students, with an exhausted teacher, surrounded by homogeny? That’s for you to decide.
The chronically employed see a life of self-employment and entrepreneurialism as too risky, not safe enough. Never having had a real job as an adult, I’ve seen friends lose their jobs, betrayed by the safety they felt they had by betting on the nameless, faceless man running a corporation created to make money, not to care for them, and I see chronic employment as too great a risk for me. I’d rather have the freedom to change with the economy, a freedom most companies don’t have, and by the time they change course it’s too late: time for layoffs. I’d rather bet on my own ability to learn, to succeed, and yes—to fail and bounce back. I control the amount of my bet, and I know what I’m betting on. I can’t avoid risk, but I can intentionally choose the risks that come with the life I desire.
It’s risky to leave the job you hate. It’s also risky, and at so high a cost, to stay there at the expense of sanity and soul. How many nights can you lie in bed staring at the ceiling, replaying conflicts and demeaning conversations with the boss? How long is your life that you can wait another five years before you cut your hours back so you can invest them instead in your own business?
It’s risky, too, to write a book, cut an album, or put your things into the back of your truck and set off across the continent, which I did in 2010, unable to reconcile myself any longer to taking the risk of it never happening. So I sold every piece of furniture I had, relinquished my lease on a nice apartment, and piled my cameras, laptops, and clothing into a 1993 Land Rover Defender with a rooftop tent, and set off down the west coast from Vancouver to take a year and circle the U.S. and Canada. I wanted to experience things I would never experience at home, find some new stories, and meet new people. I wanted to camp out in places like Monument Valley and the coast of Texas along the Gulf of Mexico. So many people told me they wished they could do what I did, and said so with such longing, never seeing that they could do it as readily as I could, but would have to make similar choices, taking similar risks, as I did. In the end I suffered no major breakdown, met no horrible end in some dark corner of the continent, and didn’t get sick. Nothing I was warned about happened.
Instead I was in Italy, the Land Rover parked in Atlanta for a month, when I fell off a 30-foot wall onto concrete below. I landed, like a cat—or a ninja, if you prefer—on my feet. And then I crumpled, which is what you do when you’ve fallen that far and landed on your feet, shattering both of them and cracking your pelvis. I ended up in the hospital in Pisa after a dramatic rescue and an ambulance ride, where I spent four days before my medical evacuation could take place and I was finally (and very heavily) sedated and put on a medical jet home to Canada.
After 40 days and nights, and surgery on my feet, I was sent home, able only to crawl, to recover at my family home, learn to walk again, and finish my fourth book. A hundred warnings about the risks of taking a journey on which I was happier than I’d been in years, and not a soul told me to be careful in Tuscany. You just can’t know. I’ve done assignments for clients in places like Haiti, Bosnia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and El Salvador. All places the U.S. State Department counselled its citizens not to visit. I’m Canadian, so I guess I get a free pass. And in all of them I was fine. I go to Tuscany to teach photography and I’m painfully broken. I will never walk the same again. What arrogance to assume we can know the true cost of anything we do. What loss to put aside the things we long—with all our hearts—to do, fearful of the risks, as if we have the first idea what those risks might even be.
The imagined risks may never happen. And we’re sidelined by the ones we never in a million years might have anticipated. I’d rather take the risk of being broken all over again than to sit safely at home only to be diagnosed, far too early in life, with cancer and be surrounded in my final days with family, friends, and bitter regret.
It’s not about avoiding risk. It never is. Because the risk is always there and always truly unknown. There are no safe bets. What there is, and always has been, is choice in the face of the unknown. You follow your heart and the best wisdom you can find in the light available to you, and then you choose. Intentionally, wholeheartedly, and knowing there will be fears and doubts, and parts of it will be scary as all hell at times. To do otherwise—to play it safe—is delusional, because safety is an illusion. “I can’t risk it” is the way we talk when we’ve abdicated responsibility for making our lives extraordinary, a thing we can create intentionally. It’s what we say when we lack the balls to say we choose to do A over B, knowing there are risks inherent in both. Life, and art, is about choosing.
The best things in life are discovered after walking through gates clearly warning of so-called risks ahead. Love. Art. Investments. Adventure. Upon seeing those signs, it’s harder to turn back, when you know that the moment you turn your back on those risks, you see signs warning of the risks of walking away. And you don’t always know. And you won’t always make the right choice. But you have one life to live and one chance to live it to its fullest, and to teach your children and friends to do the same. Don’t you dare wait until it’s crystal clear; it will never be. Nor should you choose to ignore your heart for the sake of what others expect or because it’s a little easier to do so. It will kill your soul. The soil in which you plant your seeds will be mediocre, and the fruit will be bland to others and bitter to you.