I watch my son riding his bike on the gravel road before our home. He tried a trick, wipes out, jumps mid-air and catches himself—still standing with a “WHOAH!”
He picks up the bike, climbs back on, and rides on.
A car comes down the way. I stand to get eyes on. He pulls off to the side,along way and space—adventuring but aware.
He waves. Car passes. He rides on.
Childhood is for healthy risks, small adventures we make big in our mind and young lives. It’s doing these in childhood, familiarity that such is possible, we learn and retain the ability to take and chase again in later years when—after despair of existing “through the motions”—we see, it is by risks and small adventures that we make happen the experiences we dream to know, the life we desire: a life worth living.
Never learning, never taking, we never grow—never become (whatever it is we know or sense in us) we are meant to be.
Life is not about safety. It’s not about preservation without incidental accidents and scars that are marks of active living. Life is about living.
I watch my son, making note of how the ride and adventure and space and place to explore, risk, and be a boy brings him to life and out of the boredom of safe and idle sitting in our home.
We all need those risks, those small adventures—childish or foolish as they may seem to those in comfort, complacency, and mostly idleness.
Life is not about safety. Life is about living—daring, risking, adventuring in pursuit and make of the experiences and life we all desire in our own life way: lives worth living.