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Risk: Leap and [then] the net will appear

I belive in risk. I don't believe in luck. I do believe in synchronicity.

You may call this semantic quibbling, but I don't think so. Luck is something that happens to us. Synchronicity is something that begins in our consciousness. Risk is something we undertake. Luck is passive. We trigger synchronicity. We trigger it through risk.

Goethe-- statesman, scholar, risk-taker-- told us, "Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness." He was not kidding.

All of us want a net. And we can have it, too. We just can't have it ahead of time. Listen to explorer William Hutchinson Murray on that:

Concerning all acts of initiative or creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

Murray, like Goethe, is making us a promise here: "Leap, and [then] the net will appear."

We'd really like it the other way around. Show us the net and then we'll leap. Give us the job, the beau, the deal, and then we'll commit. What do you take me for, a sucker? Only a fool would go off half-cocked chasing some dream. Only a fool-- or maybe Goethe, or maybe a mountain climber like Murray.

In order to risk, we have to be willing to look bad. We have to be willing to be a sucker. We have to be willing to look like fools.

This is the sticky part: our net is invisible. It is the unseen. It is there, but we must believe it to see it. In a moment of faith, our dreams shimmer into view.