You have to take risks at some point

COVID-19 has impacted everyone. We all had to learn how to change to stay safe. We all had to figure out the level of risk that we were willing to take in daily activities.

Want to go buy some milk? Never before has there been a risk such as this. Want to keep working to make an income to support yourself and your family, that comes with risk. Forced to stay home and close your business? That comes with risk as well.

Risk has always been there. At any point while driving down the street a car could veer towards you and cause a fatal accident. There was always risk.

But now the risk feels more real. It seems more likely to occur. Now, every move we make seems to hold more risk than it should.

People respond differently to this newfound risk. Some people deny it even exists. Some people ignore it, hoping that will make it less likely to happen. Some people become obsessed with every piece of information, terrorizing themselves.

We all handle this new risk our lives differently. We all adapted to provide as much protection as possible.

But increasing risk doesn’t mean the only option is to eliminate that risk. In fact, we can’t eliminate this risk.

That is what is so difficult for some people, including myself. Most of the things in life that hold this much risk, are easy to block out of our mind or simply avoid. But this is pervasive. It runs throughout our livelihoods.

Avoiding it means that we introduce new risk, such as the inability to feed our family. Therefore, we have to find a way to balance the risk with other areas of our lives.

Risk brings uncertainty and that is unsettling. But that doesn’t mean we can’t plan for various situations. It doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. It doesn’t mean we are helpless.

It simply means we have to learn how to balance this new risk. In You Can’t Surf from the Shore, I wrote about balancing risk. I explained that many people avoid going after their highest ambitions in life because there is the possibility of failure.

To me, this is a much greater risk. Today we have to learn how to balance risk with basic daily activities. It isn’t about going after our highest callings or ambitions. This is about our basic functions.

Therefore, everyone’s approach to the pandemic is different, and it should be. Everyone has a different level of risk. The 20-year old with no pre-existing conditions is different from the 60-year old cancer survivor.

But the common theme to us all is that we have to accept that the risk exists and do whatever is in our power to minimize the risk, for our self and others. We can still be productive. We can still improve. But we have to take into account this risk and adjust where necessary.

Putting our head in the sand isn’t an option. I’ve heard from plenty of people how frustrated they are with COVID. They want to go back to normal. They don’t want to wear a mask. They don’t want to avoid public areas.

Those are choices they are making. That is how they are responding. They are facing the risk by refusing to accept it. As with all risk, this could come back to bite them or they could avoid any consequences. That is why it is a risk. It isn’t guaranteed. It is an increase in the probability of something happening.

But the one universal truth is that we all have to figure out how to accept the current situation and keep moving forward. It might be to hunker down and wait until a vaccine comes out. It could be to keep your daily life as close to the same as possible. But we all are getting to experience what happens when a new risk emerges and changes everything.