The Greatest Risk
© 1988 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
(An excerpt from Computing
Across America, 1988)
Everyone has at one time or another shrunk from a growth opportunity
because with it comes the Unknown. The Unknown! What’s out
there, anyway?
Disappointment? Derision? Danger? Defeat? Death?
Those are all bad, certainly, but none of them are nearly as bad as
nothing. None of those things can possibly be worse than the
horror or Complacency that creeps like a psychic tapeworm into the
mind, demanding a steady diet of the bland to let it propagate and
infect those nearby. It’s insidious, evil, and epidemic in
America. It slithers out of TV sets; it crawls from the pages of
popular media. It hides in classrooms and slips unnoticed into
vulnerable young brains.
And it does all this while masquerading brilliantly as knowledge and
truth. Complacency is the adulterant of passion, the assassin of
curiosity, the lobotomizer of life itself.
A friend’s mother once listened to me talking excitedly about my
upcoming journey and shook her head in protective maternal
fright. She summed it all up without even realizing it:
“But honey, there are things out there... there are things out there we
don’t even know about!”
Right on.
It’s possible to have growth without risk, but it is growth of the
slow, vegetable kind, rarely yielding those magical breakthroughs that
make you light up with understanding. It doesn’t take anything
quite so radical as an epic bicycle trip to do this, of course, only
the courage to risk the Unknown. Any kind of Unknown -- be it
intellectual, geographical, cultural, scientific, physical... whatever.
Because the greatest risk of all is taking
no risk. That’s the one that can really get ya, the death
worse than fate.
So. Curious about something? Restless? Hungry for
knowledge or change? Got a dream?
Go for it.