Risk

"Text me when you get there! Please be careful- my life is in that car!" I yelled to Justin this morning as he walked up the hill to where his snow covered car was blowing out warm-up exhaust. He's off to orientation. Orientation at another hospital. The one where he will be picking up extra shifts. So that I can be a photographer instead of a lawyer. In the snow. In North Carolina. Where they don't salt the roads and no one knows how to drive in it.

I read a post recently on one of the many blogs that I obsessively follow that discussed holding on too tightly. I struggle with it every day. Maybe it's because I'm an oldest child. Maybe it's because I'm a girl. Maybe it's genetics. Maybe it's because I've had cancer more than once and know how quickly life can change. I hold on too tightly.

I have a funny risk tolerance. The notion has come up repeatedly lately as people respond to this career change I've decided on. You can tell the people with low risk tolerance immediately...when I mention that I'm shelving my legal career to pursue photography, they begin to blink quickly and insist that I HAVE to take the bar! Their discomfort is evident and I am often at a loss to convince them that I truly believe that it will all be okay, that they can't say anything that the voice of doubt in my head hasn't mentioned a thousand times a day.

My risk tolerance for most things is pretty high. I worked for years as a whitewater river guide, as a backpacking guide, and have done all of those "life to do list" things like sky-dived and bungee jumped and mountain biked in Moab. I quit school to "play outside" and moved on a whim whenever I got a craving for new geography. I met my husband when he and I were both jobless and hiking from Georgia to Maine, not sure exactly where we'd land when the hike was over! I like that kind of risk, it is what makes me feel like I am really living and not just "getting by." I recognize that, to great extent, it has been a privilege to be able to make these choices, and I will be the first to admit that not every risk I've taken has panned out as planned.

But over the last few years, there are areas of my life in which my tolerance for risk has diminished. While I'm still content to "jump out of a perfectly good airplane," watching my husband drive away on icy, unsalted, roads to a hospital an hour away makes my heart clench with fear. The safety and well-being of the ones I love is a risk that I'm no longer comfortable with.

So I will sit here and keep reminding myself that I can't hold on so tightly and wait for that phone to ring.