Is living without risk really living at all?

Taking my life in my hands — as we all do when getting out of bed — I walked along the Thames last week. On the northern footpath east of Blackfriars Bridge, a young man ran atop the adjacent wall and jumped across a gap in the brickwork. The gap was six feet long, the wall as high. Had he missed, he’d have met all manner of hazards on either side. He gained nothing overt from that leap, only an ephemeral sense of satisfaction, yet risked broken bones or a fractured skull. As he turned heel in preparation for repeating the feat, I was both aghast and impressed.

We could call that young man foolhardy. Yet I wager that an ‘ephemeral sense of satisfaction’ is precious to someone in his twenties, and could in time transfer to making leaps of a metaphorical sort later in a career. When I was young, I took an enormous leap of faith by committing to becoming a novelist — a risk of which I was under-aware at the time — which to most clued-up observers was foolhardy in the extreme.