Colin and I met when we both lived in Kansas City. This June we will have lived away from Kansas City for 7 years.
We left because we felt the call of life all its opportunities. We wanted to launch our life on a raft of experience we could build together.
On Understanding Risk
I am not sure if we knew this definitively when we got together, but this attitude towards life was essential to what holds Colin and I together. Even though our some of our interests and our careers are different, we have a parallel vision of life.
Life is risk. The human frame takes on Mother Nature at every turn. Everyday we wake up, we don’t have the answers to what is to come. We can’t save ourselves from certain death by any means!
If we want to delude ourselves into thinking “we know” or we are “safe,” well that is a choice to make.
As for Colin and me, we prefer to ride risk, love it, and find what is there for us.
Colin lived that way before he met me. It was the sort of life that made him quite happy to ride his bike from North Vancouver to UBC everyday. And back. It was the sort of mindset that makes him love skiing and rock climbing.
I lived that way before I met him. I quit my stable job as a TV news director to work freelance. I took internships at Disney World, and I was a live-in volunteer at a soup kitchen and halfway house when I was 19.
It was natural that we continued our lives in that way. So even though we both had dozens of friends and a happy life in Kansas City, we chose to move on. We felt life and all its risky expectations calling again to test the boundaries of our joy. We sold it all and moved to London.
In the seven years since we got married and moved away, our life has been a domestic roller coaster. On the outside, it looks quite suburban and blase. We even have white pickets and a minivan. But our life of risk rolls on in magnificent tumult as we say “yes” to the unexpected twists and turns of “normality.”
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