Safety.
It’s a term that instantly stimulates our minds.
It evokes imagery of a blanket. Or a lock and key.
These connotations demonstrate just how pervasive this aspect of our lives is. What else can combine images of something so warm and soft with something so cold and metallic?
Even so, it’s hard for us to pinpoint why safety is so essential. Much like True North or gravity, we seem to take its presence in our lives for granted.
I believe this assumption is less willful than it is inevitable.
We inherently know to hold safety in high regard. Yet, we can’t seem to verbalize our instinct.
Perhaps this is the case because the concept of safety crosses basic boundaries of classification. There’s the physical component, which insulates us from mortal injury. And then there’s the mental component, which insulates us from disastrous consequences.
At first glance, the physical component would seem to be the most important. After all, if this aspect were to eviscerate, so would our existence.
The physical component of safety is the reason there are railings on balconies and seat belts in cars. It explains why we know better than to jump from a cliff face onto jagged rocks below. Or why we shuffle our feet when traversing icy sidewalks in tennis shoes.
By tending to our physical safety, we prevent ourselves from getting maimed, paralyzed or killed. Perhaps just as critically, we avoid reduction of our existence to a statistic of infamy.
The list of tragic blunders is already quite lengthy. Anytime we say Don’t do that. It can kill you. it means two things.
- Someone did do that very thing and paid the ultimate price.
- Someone else likely witnessed the tragedy and warned others not to repeat the action.
If we keep safety front and center, we avoid becoming one of these cautionary tales.
So, yes. The physical component of safety is quite essential. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the mental component.
The mental component of safety is what insulates us from undesired outcomes. These can include the loss of status, the loss of income and the loss of possessions.
These circumstances are seemingly less severe than major injury, paralysis or death. While those outcomes are permanent, it’s possible to recover from the setbacks from a loss or prestige or earthly possessions.
Yet, the mental component of safety has an outsized impact on our behavior. While the physical component impacts our actions in the moment, the mental component impacts our behavior over the long term.
And this is not always to our benefit.
Consider this.
When we prioritize our mental safety, we often aim for stability. This causes us to become risk-averse to a fault.
Why? Because risk provokes change. And change threatens stability.
Avoiding risk is tantamount to maintaining our status quo. So, the safe play is the least risky option.
Yet, risk-aversion can cause us to limit our potential. It can cause us to sacrifice happiness for steadiness. It can cause us to leave opportunities on the table when they aren’t a sure thing.
The more decisions we make under this guise, the more we find ourselves trapped.
We settle for what we get. And we stick with it, even if it saps the joy and vitality out of our lives.
Worse still, our society actively reinforces this behavior.
We’re expected to work to earn the money that pays the bills. To follow the well-worn path others have walked before. To be inconspicuous, safe and normal.
Our happiness and our untapped potential don’t factor into these expectations.
Sure, we pay lip service to these factors through Christmas cards, Hollywood movie scripts and the year-end bonus system. But we are trained to be means to an end. To promote the system that keeps us all ordinary, and thereby protects us.
The problem is that all of this is a grand illusion.
No matter how safe we’re taught to play it, risk abounds. Bad circumstances continue to lurk around the bend, looking for the right moment to strike.
And since we’re ingrained with the values of stability, we find ourselves woefully unprepared to deal with sudden and unexpected changes.
When we lose our job or our home, we feel violated. And when we lose our status, we’re devastated.
These situations generally don’t leave us dead or disfigured. They generally don’t leave us in mourning over the loss of a loved one.
Even so, we end up emotionally broken.
We’re completely unable to cope with circumstance. The house of cards we built to organize our lives has been toppled by a Jenga tower. And we don’t know what to do next.
There’s only one way out of this maelstrom. And that’s to take a sledgehammer to the rules of the mental component of safety.
Only by accounting for risk can we be prepared to deal with it. That means acting a little bolder, staying a little truer to our spirit and even formulating Plan B while Plan A is humming along.
By making ourselves a little more vulnerable, we strengthen our resiliency.
And if we do this at scale, we can break the chains that bind us. We can formally reject the societal codes that leave us defanged in our volatile world.
So, let’s stop running from risk. And let’s embrace a universal truth.
Safety is important. But it’s not a panacea.
Act accordingly.