Life is edge. There is no experience worth living that doesn’t include the risk of pain.
And that’s a problem. Evolution has conditioned us to protect ourselves, physically and emotionally, to survive.

And as time passes, it gets worse. Do you remember how you used to jump from trees, do the weirdest things with your bike, dive from great heights – without any hesitations ? Dive into friendships and relationships, too, driven the need for companionship or hormones ?
We experience pain, we grow scars, and they put big red danger arrows on things around us.

We have more to lose, composure-wise. Where feeling off-kilter was a way of life for the first 20 years or so, now we have refined an attitude that gets us through the day and works for our contacts with others. We master indifference as an art form, shielding our desires from ourselves, shunting off thoughts and people that come dangerously close.

The most interesting people are often the ones that keep the ability to jump. They don’t have an easy time of it, oh no. One thing they don’t do is stand still. They don’t hesitate to expose themselves, again and again, at the risk of getting hurt. It takes a peculiar kind of madness, or courage, to do this.

I think it’s time for me to try for exposure mode again. This shell that’s sheltered me through the last year, it also keeps me locked in, and I feel myself growing stale in there. OK. Saying it was easy, doing it is harder.

and a good old classic with that:

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