Life on the edge

There are people that constantly live on the edge - I have been told that I happen to be one of them (I disagree - from my point of view). Let me clarify what I mean; by living on the edge I mean indulging in risky behaviour. Risky behaviour could encompass financial, personal, mental , health and numerous other situations. The common thread in this is risk. 

The standard explanations either are - some of us are wired to be risk eager as compared to the norm or that risk taking is a personality trait that could be explained in terms of attention seeking. At times this is true; a teenager might behave in a manner that is detrimental to their health (booze, drugs etc) and that might be the result of a deficit of attention from what the teenage considers as their “people”. However the statistical number of risk takers that exhibit the behaviour due to a real attention deficit is quite low compared to the others.  The majority of risk takers do so because they are in an continuous pursuit of a novel, intense and complex sensation and experience, and they are willing to take risks for the sake of such experience. This is a trait that psychology calls sensation seeking. 

Taking risks is not the end goal of sensation seeking; on the contrary it is probably the collateral result that people pay for activities that satisfy the need for change and excitement. The interesting thing is that many of the activities are not risky at all; however do get bracketed as such. There of course is a bunch of outliner activities that are truly risky e.g drug abuse , substance abuse and the like. 

We are a risk taking species. We originated somewhere in Africa and have spread across the globe. Exploration is risky. Hunting is risky. However we as a species survived due to the ability of a few to take risk. Risk taking helps us discover. One might argue that modern life does not need people to take risk - all that had to be discovered has already been discovered. Nothing could be further from the truth than that previous sentence. Every day is discovery. Life as a whole is discovering who you really are. At times discovery needs to be sparked with excitement. The mind and the body has an almost insatiable need for excitement. And it’s in that process that we learn and grow. The question then is how far would you go for that excitement; the further you go from the average the higher the risk. 

Excitement can be found in exploring new personal and professional relationships, in financial health, in material wealth and a lot more. Any adjective describing human behaviour could be associated with mental or physical excitement- the amount of excitement is directly related to the amount of risk one is willing to experience. Sometimes it’s just the experience of the risk that brings the excitement. 

All of us know and have an envelope. Stretching that envelope is risk - that is the edge. As long as the outcome is satisfactory,  we know that the envelope has expanded and we are bound to try stretching it again. It is human nature. It is what drives our species. Stretch it with the absolute knowledge that the envelope might rip and that you might have to start again; stretching without that knowledge is stupid and what I would classify as attention seeking behaviour.  Finally one needs to also remember that risk taking has collateral results- you might be taking the risk however the impact on your people could be more that what you anticipated. The edge might not be just yours alone to decide.

C