Life, Love and other risks we take.

I've been thinking a lot lately about risks. I've never been much of a risk taker in most aspects. I tried repelling once but found myself frozen at the top of the cliff and unable to just let go, trusting the cable would really hold and not allow my body to plummet to the rocky ground below. I've never enjoyed the weightlessness and uncertainty of water sports and forget sky diving! Its never going to happen for me. But the fact is life is nothing but a series of risks of one kind of another. As much as I want to believe I'm running from uncertainties, I'm not. No one is.

Someone once said that the only guarantee you get in life is that there are no guarantees. How true that rings for me, especially at this point of my life. If you had asked me fifteen years ago where I'd be now, I would have told you that I'd be an independent and successful business woman living in Manhattan. Five years down the road I found myself wanting nothing more than to be a mother and wife. If anyone would have told me then that I would find myself unfulfilled and moving on from my marriage in eight short years, I would have told them they were nuts. We were the exception, we would make it work. Maybe there are no guarantees, but this was that one thing that broke all the rules. This was a guarantee.

I was wrong. Just like everything else in life, this marriage too had no guarantee stamp.

No one can really anticipate all that could go wrong with a relationship when they are first entering into it. Allowing ourselves to love is a risk we take. Perhaps its the biggest risk we take in life because its a risk we take blindly. Its difficult to pinpoint exactly when and how the whole thing fell apart. A marriage is like a rock, strong and binding. What no one tells you is that all the stresses of life are constantly chiseling away at your rock. Little by little, it pecks off pieces so small you don't even notice its happening at first, then before you know it you find that your rock has a huge gap right down the middle of it. This is the crucial point of that relationship when you must decide to either build a bridge or let the whole thing crumble.

Regrets? Of course I have regrets. Many of them. More than I want to think about or post on this blog. But I don't regret taking the risk. I don't regret allowing love in. I don't regret it because I learned so many valuable lessons from it that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. But what I do regret is standing on that cliff twelve years ago and not just taking that risk, that leap of faith, letting go and letting myself jump into that unknown. Because if I knew then what I know now I would have realized that no life is worth living if its a life with no risks.