I see it all the time because my occupation and hobbies have danger laced into them. Right around the six-month mark is where all the bruises and broken things come. When you’re just starting out you’re all wide eyed, aware of your soft doughy flesh and how the world wants to rip it away from you. You take your time around turns, more brake less throttle, yes you’re having fun but you’re as terrified as you are having fun.
But then you make it past a few sunsets, things get predictable, “when I do this, this happens”. Thoughts creep in, awareness of your own fragility erased with thoughts of an unchecked to-do list. How many people have had their last thoughts be just that? Some casual meandering of the mind the precursor to catastrophe. A liquid banality coursing through their brain before blood is on the pavement.
Sometimes we get twisted luck with little token Memento Mori’s, the grim reaper in an ambulance flashing by. That uncomfortable truth glistening from the blood on the dash of a commuter who’s driven that road a thousand times snapping us out of the metastasizing honey soaked malaise of our own false sense of immortality.
You must not forget the fragile nature of this thing, your mom knows it, and I’m sure she lets you know it all the time, but that’s a background buzz like she’s got these bees in her mouth. “Quiet, mom, I want to do a handstand.”
Now don’t shy away from danger, this isn’t an advertisement for bubble wrap, rather a reminder in cognoscente. I know as well as you do the most real things are closest to danger, sweet soliloquies dripping in mercilessness. We crave the exacting honesty of danger, to dance with reality, skim over the water of our own mortality at 1,000 miles per hour and get our beak wet. But you must never get comfortable.
You get caught in a drift you’ll die. You refuse the call to danger and you’ll never live. But you can survive in a throttle pulled back perceptiveness, the understanding that sometimes just because something has happened one way a thousand times doesn’t guarantee the same again.
Lions and tigers and bears prowl behind bushes you thought were dancing in the wind, blind corners with dead stops, unstoppable forces and immovable objects against our shattering glass bones. Chaos smells when you’ve lost your respect for it and it’s so very very hungry.
Let it rip, let it burn, but keep your back tense and your eyes peeled. Comfort is the tip of danger’s razor-sharp knife, the fuse to its quick kinetic ugly.