The following is an excerpt she posted on her blog recently about taking risks and living life:
"personally i am very hard on myself if i get hurt, because i see it as a result of having made a mistake while doing something high risk. although i don’t see it that way for others, i am always very critical of my own mistakes, especially when it matters a lot. though of course, this is the way to learn and improve.
the only way to gain experience is to do things, so we all have to struggle with the learning phase, and partly hope we are lucky as we gain skills and judgment. i guess this is just like life, for everyone who grows from a baby, having to learn to survive. one thing i really enjoy is learning how to push my limits in intelligent, conservative style. freedom is a complex thing, and not easily earned…
i decided early on that freedom, for me, means taking on risk in this style and living all the way, rather than locking myself in a bubble and trying to reduce all risk from my world. but i do work hard to be competent, intelligent and conservative, to preserve that freedom….hence, the spot device, heli insurance, and the parachute ;)
you can certainly climb, base jump, hike, ultrarun, ski, surf, paddle or do anything in a less conservative style, and plenty of people do, as you only have to watch the youtube extreme sports channel to observe, but that’s not for me. it seems like if you can make it through the baby/discovery years with some luck, then competence and good judgment will keep you generally pretty safe after that. you can’t continually do things in a yahoo style, without your luck running out. you can push the boundaries of what you think is possible, and you can do it carefully. to me, this is really living."
Amen, sister. Amen.
Eiger Birds from steph davis on Vimeo.
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