Pathways: Allowing Risk to do the Tango with Chance

We all take different pathways to partake in different journeys, and we take on these journeys at different paces. To undermine another person and their journey is to undermine all journeyers, for we are all after one thing – to reach a destination. Destinations vary, thus so do the journeys and journeyers.

To live in a place which is not considered ‘third-world’, means one lives a rushed life. One lives a life where it is necessary to eat before one is eaten, to conquer before one is conquered. While we all have these factors to worry ourselves about, we need not wander into another’s life or problems and judge them, because we are active persons in the journey to destinations, too. Like a child of a strict tribe, we all have a purpose, and to have our purposes respected we must respect other persons’ purposes. One cannot expect an apple to grown on a tree bearing oranges, in the same way as one cannot expect respect from those whom they disrespect; to find an apple, go to an apple tree – to find respect, see to it that your source of respect is in the right place.

Each person partakes in things they see fit to themselves, nobody else can choose what they see fit because their vision is their own and each of our visions focus on varied things. Those who focus on the same things tend to cluster together and travel a seemingly matched journey, but those travelling in transverse journeys do not necessarily need to travel without one another – they do not have to even have a meeting point, they may at some stages travel parallel with one another and thereafter separate. It would, however, be totally ludicrous to deny that the other’s journey is not a decent one, or one of worth – for the person emitting the denial is no better than the person receiving it. Each person is equal, despite their journey choices.

Choices determine the course of journeys, and though some persons may be on the same journey, their journeys will never utterly coincide because each person holds a different choice. This can be so little as choosing to travel in the bus rather than in a personally owned vehicle. The driver of the bus may have a random stroke that day and crash the bus, wiping out the lives of all those in the bus including himself, and the lives contained in the three cars on the oncoming lane – however if the person who chose to take the bus that morning had instead taken their car, they could have been part of an on-looking group opposite the crash site. This is not to say that one must not take a risky choice, this is rather to say that choices are not permanent determinants because chance plays a rough part in events which can take place. Despite the dangers in the world and how unpredictable occurring events may be, one must not limit themselves to a narrow path. One must allow themselves to branch out and make the most of their journey, because taking a risk creates the muddling of coincidences that one may run into, thus dipping one into a chance lottery, so to speak.

Many persons take risks that they are advised not to on their journeys, and most risks, despite the rest resulting in bad things and sometimes demise, end up bettering one’s journey. Risks dance the Tango with chance, while coincidence is playing the violin. Risk’s body beckons chance to twirl, and coincidence vigorously shreds on its violin’s strings to remind risk and chance that it exists. Ultimately though, it is risk who leads chance – for without risk, chance might fall for coincidence and the violin music of fate will become silenced, and the path that one is taking might become too predictable – that is not to say that it must be undermined, though.

To undermine another one’s journey is to undermine potential. An undermining one may have the potential to do what the one they are undermining are doing, but they may not have activated and used their risks, thus they try to hinder another’s journey in order to acquire the illusory validation of their own journey. This gives one the false pretense that whispers to them that the journey they are taking is the righteous one for them, when really it is not the journey upon which their potential is yodelling. To truly accept one’s journey, one must accept the other journeys taking place along with their own.

One cannot validate their journey in the undermining of another’s. In the event that one does, one destroys their potential in believing that another’s potential is not being reached. One must allow the Tango between risk and chance so that coincidence may play less of a part, for as it plays less of a part it tames fate so that it allows risk to develop its potential with chance.