Risky business

​(Image: From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes, 1874 edition)

I’ve always had a habit of commemorating ordinary things with unnecessary sentimentality: ‘This is the last time I’ll eat breakfast as a teenager.’ ‘This time two years ago I was eating breakfast in another country.’ ‘I wonder if the person driving the old green Corolla - my first car - thinks about who drove it before they did?’ ‘I wonder what about me will be different next time I stand in this exact spot, in front of this very vantage point?’
It’s a form of being utterly seduced by the insistence of progression and improvement, while trying to retain the familiar feelings of an assured ‘what is.’
When you’re viewing things from a sort of melodramatic isthmus point, where the could of it all will soon be rearranged into ‘what was’, it’s like being suspended inside a realm of possibility.

I’ve often thought how torturous it must be for people awaiting the results of some big diagnosis. Or, those few days after receiving one, trying to contort their huge visions for the future into a harsh and dulled new self restricted by physical fallout. The small pocket of space when someone wakes and comes to, in a groggy, warm moment of forgetfulness and hope for a day as normal before the reality sinks in.
In a more collective way, it’s kind of piteous watching our society try to reconcile our bygone era of hyper-reality and excess with the stark, confronting modesty and restriction of these recession years. We are wedged inside a dichotomy: where we balk at paying $9 for a cauliflower, yet avidly plan our somewhat unjustified, Instagram-driven travel to Europe for a moment of escapism. Despite the continent being in crisis, our drive is still only concerned with grasping for, and consuming, a dissolving ideal. Believing that because ‘that’s how we’ve always been’, that that’s how we always should be.


Does anyone else out there find it way too tempting to preemptively analyse the zeitgeist of ‘our times?’ And what does that even mean?? I have to be careful to moderate myself as I try to comprehend things. To find a kinship and focus beyond mere observation and critique. Because there’s a rawness of care that seems to arrive when all the old hiding spots feel ill fitting or off limits, leaving you asking the all important question: “am I a comfortable dwelling place?” In the wake of instability I’ve come to parse out this sort of confronting realisation that human partnerships are unpredictable and intertwined. Like in Titanic when Kate Winslet is in that busty dress on the wrong side of the railing and tells Leo DiCaprio to go away but he just says “I can’t. I’m too involved now.” Or maybe it’s also like what my friend’s dad said during his speech on her wedding day: “love is risky business.” Yet how beautiful it is to blindly track on towards a future of unknowns with others. Being equally invested and affected by their private worlds, having let them become entangled with yours. There are so many more variables to contend with. A greater susceptibility to loss of control over your own desired outcome or aspired long-term plan, but a worthy sacrifice knowing it goes both ways. And that mutual choice to stick around “despite” must feel like a pretty good and grown up thing to want to do.


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