Leave the wrist guards at home (sometimes)
November is the month when I think about death more than usual. There's a good reason for that. In Poland, the month opens with All Saints' Day, when we visit cemeteries and light candles for those we've lost. And by then, autumn has stopped being a pretty postcard and started being something you feel in your bones.
This year, the season came with two personal events. First, I had surgery to correct my deviated septum. Shortly before that, I tried a small stunt on my rollerblades and injured my wrist. Yes, I was riding without protective gear, which was a bit reckless. In my defense, I'd lent it to my son, so I consider myself at least partially absolved.
Thinking about death leads me, naturally, to thinking about growing old - or, as I sometimes call it, the second half of life. And closely tied to that is the question of risk.
When I look at my dear parents in their later years, there's one thing I find hard to watch: how they've let go of some of their goals and ambitions. Some of it is about health, of course. But some of it, as I see it, is about risk management. They say that with age we don't become wiser - we become more risk-averse. I feel that deeply, and I can see it in my own choices too.
I'm constantly looking for life hacks - small ways to improve the flow and balance of my days. I seek equilibrium the way water seeks its level. I'm fascinated by anything that makes life more frictionless. That's how I build habits, and that's how I believe improvement happens. Experience isn't beautiful on its own; what I'm really after are the mindful tweaks that make flow possible. They're my holy grail.
But there's a flip side. When you streamline your life and make some parts of it truly frictionless, you also make fewer mistakes, experiment less, and take fewer risks. You quietly become more risk-averse. And that might be exactly what holds back growth - what makes us old. We grow warier of the unknown and of surprises.
We'd like to go through life like a ship on calm waters - no storms, no reefs, nothing in the way. Just sailing smoothly and surely to our destination. But the obstacles are there for a reason. They keep us young. They make us question things. They make us uneasy. They push us out of our comfort zones.
So here's what concerns me most. Organizing a perfect life and steering it relentlessly in that direction might, in a sense, age us faster. It's a bit like building a bubble and moving in - flawless, without a single dent. I don't think that's right. Over time, we may become more and more rigid, uncomfortable with anyone or anything that rocks the boat or nudges us off our clear, safe path.
That's why I think we should leave some room for experiments. We should take risks, even if it occasionally costs us a sprained wrist. Maybe we should even forget things now and then, just to see what happens - to test our ability to bounce back and to stress-test the system. Because the system always wants to return to equilibrium.
But is equilibrium really what we should expect by default? Or should we, once in a while, leave the wrist guards at home and see what happens?