It’s our imagination, seeing hungry monsters in shadows.

The imagination creating a “what if” wrought in the most negative image.

It’s all the ways we have been manipulated to be easy to manage by parents, teachers, and friends – especially the well intentioned ones.

Safety is a killer of dreams and ruiner of health.

“That’s not safe!” is the worst thing parents, teachers, and school admins can ever say to a child. It kills the desire for adventure, exploration, and even helping others.

Today I hear “stay safe” from people all the time instead of “good bye”. If they said “stay afraid” it would be a more honest message.

Life spans are longer than ever, war is rare, diseases are fleeing, medical repairs are amazing. And ultimately, we all die – death is the great equalizer of life on earth.  (Covid has not significantly raised our global death rates)

We have created lives of boredom and safety and being excited by the next season of Bird Box. We default to “I can’t do that” before we even know what “that” is.

Our lives are shallow, meaningless, and loaded with pharmaceuticals so we don’t scream our misery to the skies. We do everything we can to avoid that demonized idea of fear.

We are very safe and comfortable on the couch.

We have the antidote available.

Tiny risks are like compounding interest – they grow our courage and confidence and quality of life.

They give us adventure, rewards, and meaning. Risks are awesome modeling for our kids, friends, and co-workers. Risks get us to learn skills, trust ourselves, and improve our brain chemistry. Just like building a big Lego project, each tiny risk adds to an amazing outcome.

Examples of tiny risks: asking the Starbucks Barista how their day is going, taking a walk around the neighborhood with your phone in your pocket, smiling at a stranger, going to a live event, and asking our kids what they learned interesting at school. Thousands of possible tiny experiments exist, your challenge is to start anywhere and stay persistent.

You may need to use “slow exhale breath” to manage your fear and take the tiny risk.

I use slow exhale breath constantly to manage my brain chemistry and to give my intellect the space to take action. Slow exhale is when our exhale is 3-4 times longer than our inhale. Doing this for 2 minutes slows our heart rate and drops our cortisol levels. I practice this daily whenever I think about breath.

People who live with fear ruling their lives die just like people who aren’t ruled by fear – the difference is regret, the ones who aren’t ruled by fear have much fewer or zero regrets.

How sad to be a few hours from death and wishing you could go back to being 20 or 40 or even 70 to do those things you always dreamed of?  How different could those final hours be knowing you’d had all the adventures, impacted all the people, taken all the risks to live a full and courageous life?

“Easy” is the wrong metric to seek. Easy and safe are the prison for a regret filled death.

Rather the self aware and mindful hard path is the smart way to travel.  The hard path is investing in risks, saying “no” to fear, and opening the prison door.

Welcome to ground zero. It’s the first minute of the rest of your life.

Every day we wake up and have the opportunity to choose a path – will you take the safe, easy, prison or the risky road to adventure and fulfillment?

I’ve made my choice 🙂