Risk and Adventure

Campaign For Adventure . org

"Anxiety is one of the greatest of modern ills. And it flourishes most in the fat soil of security. It is a middle-class disease, endemic in those countries which enjoy the highest standards of living and the greatest stability. We have banished fear, which is a healthy emotion, only to admit anxiety, which is a morbid one. We no longer wake up in the morning mildly astonished and delighted to have been safely brought to the beginning of this day. We no longer spring to our feet to satisfy ourselves that there is no immediate threat. Instead we come gradually to consciousness, and lie in bed in complete safety, gnawed by anxiety... The man who pins his faith on security is bound to suffer from anxiety, for he knows in his heart that however many insurance policies he takes out, he can never really be safe. This very night his soul may be required of him. It is only when he turns outward, to some end outside himself, in other words embarks on life's adventures, that he saves himself and exchanges anxiety for mere fear."
Tom Price. Address to the RSA 1966

"Risk is crucial to life... Without an understanding of risk, there is no achievement, there is no sense of the need to strive for things and no sense of how to cope with failure. Children have to be allowed to fail, to face risk, even danger at times, in order to recognise the emotions triggered by those events, find ways of coping with them and develop their own judgement. When children haven't developed a solid basis of judgement in the face of risk, adolescence may be harder to deal with. In fact we may be unwittingly sowing the seeds for greater health-risk in teenagers due to our reluctance to let them experiment as younger children."
Kate Figes. The Guardian Aug. 14 2000

"Taking risks is part of growing up and doing things that you haven't done before, and so may be creative. But you also need a sense of when pushing those boundaries stops being creative and becomes disturbing or self-destructive."
Jeannie Milligan (Psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic)

"It is counter-productive to focus on keeping children away from every risk, however slight... Our task as adults is to contribute towards children's development as they become competent adults, to be part of their growing up. Children need to learn about safety and about handling risks..."
Jennie Lindon 'Too safe for their own good?'

"The worship of safety represents a profoundly pessimistic attitude towards human potential."
Frank Furedi's book "A Culture of Fear" 1998

"Adventure is when the individual steps beyond their previous experience and where the activity has an element of the unknown in the outcome."
Dictionary definition

"Life is safer than it has ever been, but we're no longer prepared to accept risk in anything we do. <...> Why don't we have more common-sense? <...> We need to make sensible decisions about what really is dangerous, formed on the basis of weighing up the facts, rather than public hysteria. By making everything appear life-threatening, we're in danger of crying wolf once too often. People who do a lot in their lives risk making a lot of mistakes; people who do less probably make fewer; and there are some people who never make any mistakes at all. But they're not really living."
Alice Thomson, The Daily Telegraph

"A journey that is self-consciously about safety is very different to one that is about exploration and discovery. The end result of the obsession with risk is to endorse a diminished sense of humanity and the human potential for improvement."
Dr Frank Furedi, op cit

“We should not ask what the meaning of life is. Rather, each man is questioned by life and must answer for his own life. Adventure heightens that questioning."
Viktor Frankl

"Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure."
Piero Ferrucci

"It is only by taking risks from one hour to the other that we live at all."
William James

"Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk."
Salvador Dali Lama