Risk Assessment
reporting on the reluctance to report
In my estimation, the Universe has a colossal sense of the comic. Last week I had a Risk Assessment Report due for Climate Change & Environmental Management. I was dragging my heels on it, and wondering why. Sure, there’s the doubt and uncertainty from learning new tools, but it felt deeper than that. And, sure, there’s the fact that it’s about something I don’t currently care about — the risks to a coastal commercial property in the next 50 years due to climate change/global warming factors.
I mean it’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I take issue with the resistance folks have to what’s happening globally, which leads them to continue to build on the coasts. In denial of actual data on sea level rises, increased flooding, increased beach erosion, increased intensity of cyclones, increased ocean acidification and all the rest, they keep on keeping on.
On the surface, I’d rather turn my attention to measures for mitigating all these things, yet I do realize that one way to engage with that resistance is to speak to what they care about—the fun they have in the water, the holidays they want to take, the money they want to make with their seaside motel, etc, etc.
Another way to get a grip on why so many of us are avoiding what needs to be done is to understand the avoidance in the first place. Below my whiteboard of categorized lists of things to do for Uni, Rowing, Astro, Yoga, Solo Show, and Personal, I taped up this provocation.
How is it that a Risk Assessment Report that I don’t seem to have a personal stake in (this nomad is nowhere near the place in life to buy a property, much less a commercial coastal one), is threatening my identity? And what does it have to do with my recent bike accident?
Well, thanks for asking. Here’s my take, and how I see comedy entering the scene…
I mentioned in a recent post on the current Mercury Retrograde how I’m a late degree Aries, which is meant to mean that I’m a tad less reactive than an early degree Ram. Less Rammy, if you will. I’d say that’s true and perhaps marginally reinforced by the fact that folks rarely guess I’m an Aries at all. Truth be told, though, reactivity is still part of my/this life’s learning curve. I tend to operate instinctively, or else not at all.
For example, if I had done a risk assessment for my Wellington studio I wouldn’t have taken on the initial 2 year lease. Instead, I based my decision on the feel of the place and gauged my ability to meet the rent on a great deal of optimism. When I committed, all I had was 2 months’ worth of rent paid ahead on a $50,000 per year commercial lease (that amount includes the overheads on the business). That was it.
If I had stopped to notice that the entire world was going into recession and the landlord had misrepresented the rate (something I only learned 5 years later, when I tried, and failed, to recoup the $27,000 I was overcharged), and that I was a tad too early on the yoga craze hitting NZ, I wouldn’t have done it.
Or another, more relevant, example is the fact that two days before my assignment was due (and I was making only slow headway on it), I headed into a meeting with a professor who warned me she didn’t want to work with me on my thesis. Insisting on meeting her, on going head to head so I could gauge in-person why she was so clear before we’d even met, was a very Aries thing to do. Headstrong.
On the way there, within minutes of the Aries Sun being directly opposite my natal Uranus in Libra (for all you astro-geeks in the house), which translates to mean a standoff between the headstrong Aries energy everyone’s feeling and my own personal tendency towards innovating in the arena of relationships, balance, and justice, I crashed my bike. It wasn’t a terribly bad crash but it did startle me and re-injure an already troubled right wrist.
I know this is feeling like a long story to make a short point, but bear with me. The reason I crashed was because I failed to make a proper risk assessment of where to cross in front of oncoming traffic in order to breach the deep curb at just the right place. I wasn’t in a hurry, which is unusual, but I also didn’t want to wait in the middle of the road with 2 lanes of traffic going in both directions. But because it’s a heavy bike and the curb was deeper at that spot where I needed to get off the road before a car hit me, my tire went into the groove instead of over it.
What went over the curb was me.
And I did what you’re not meant to do when you fall which is FOOSH - fall on outstretched hands. I learned that acronym today at the osteopath who treated me. Put an “li” in there and it makes even more sense - foo-li-sh.
I explained to him that I had pulled my right wrist last December while loading a heavy 8 person boat into the water, and I had been rehabilitating it since then. He called this, funnily enough, “distraction”. My wrist had been “distracted”. So it felt like hitting the pavement last week had countered that destabilization. The osteo called this, as you might expect, compression.
I LOL’d when he said “distraction”. I am forever saying how nearly everything humans get into is distraction. Distraction from the real work at hand - the personal evolution, the collective evolution, the care needed to carry on. Yet it’s true that I have also been distracted. Just because I can see it collectively doesn’t mean I don’t have my own measure of it to manage.
I have been doing all the positive procrastination possible (cleaning, organizing, mending, watching seemingly-relevant media, you name it…), all while mulling the deeper meaning of that quote from Mark Manson’s book (and recent doco film).
The identity I have had - how is that being threatened by this assignment, this shift in life direction that finds me in a new country essentially on my own? To name a few things I’ve been avoiding doing or “processing” lately.
What was even funnier to me - so funny that tears of psycho-emotional release slid silently out of my eyes and into my ears as I lay on the osteo table - was that my original injury to this right wrist happened when I was 7. Then, too, I failed to make a proper risk assessment before acting (again, astro-geeks will easily align all this with my Chiron Return plugged into the recent eclipse conjunct Chiron). Spurred on by a dare (as Aries often are), I jumped from the top of the sliding board.
I took a short cut. There was no other way I could beat her to the bottom, since she was in front of me. I had made this jump many times before. But in the excitement of the moment’s competition/play, I didn’t look before I leaped and I landed on the back of another girl’s neck. Luckily her neck didn’t break. My wrist did, though.
Both times - on the sliding board and on my bike last week - I took a shortcut without pause. Listen, I’m not beating myself up here. I’m simply evaluating and finding it hysterically informative - this is the healing and wisdom that comes of these Chironic learnings.
So here’s my answer to that question I’ve been mullling:
Being cautious and thorough threatens my identity as someone who is brave, bold, sure-footed, and strong-willed.
In both instances - as a child and as an emerging adult - my agency was then curtailed when my dominant hand was bound and in a sling.
Which required me to use my non-dominant hand.
Which required me to slow down.
And in both instances I was attempting to be included - even accepted (or at least not ostracized or left out) - and I was taking short cuts to do so.
The result, again, in both instances, has been that in my resistance to slowing down enough to assess the risks, I’ve been forced to slow down by the repercussions. However, what seemed like an accident or an obstacle or a challenge has become an opportunity to learn new skills and tools by using my non-dominant hand. How I do all the normal things I usually do then becomes apparent and widens my perspectives and awareness.
It’s a form of re-wiring we all could do to re-cognize the wider impacts our seemingly small individual (and often unconscious) actions have. Not to mention becoming more aware of the wider industrial impacts that feed our consumption.
What we’re facing into now is the repercussions of not doing a risk assessment earlier on, before we got all caught up in the post WWII flow of industry, plastics, growth. Repercussions such as the frightening rates of species extinctions, the shifting of the seasons that mean Spring now comes 4 days earlier each decade, and the increases of despair and violence that ripple out from these patterns into the human populations.
Meanwhile, we’re all streaming along, literally sucked into the streaming networks. When I scan them, I find so little worth watching amongst so much. How is it that we can watch all that fictitious horror as an active distraction from looking at the real horror?
I’m bewildered.
So I’m going to walk a few doors down to the local library (one of my all-time favorite places on the planet is any library at all) and take out Mark’s sequel, Everything is F*cked: a book about Hope.
“We live in an interesting time. Materially, everything is the best it’s ever been—we are freer, healthier and wealthier than any people in human history. Yet, somehow everything seems to be irreparably and horribly f*cked—the planet is warming, governments are failing, economies are collapsing, and everyone is perpetually offended on Twitter. At this moment in history, when we have access to technology, education and communication our ancestors couldn’t even dream of, so many of us come back to an overriding feeling of hopelessness.”
Did comedy ever fully show up in this post?
Perhaps not, but in the last few days I’ve had calls, out of the blue, booking me into local open mic nights. I’ll have 5 minutes to identify our human resistance to fearlessly facing the hopelessness, to thoroughly assess the risks of all options, and to ideally draw some genuine laughter from the audience in the process.
Sheesh, no biggie.
