Risk

Risk.

It means traversing that heart aching, gob stopping desperation when you feel you've somehow wrong footed yourself. You - that forever safe player, the I'm-always-right mate who's never been anything but cool as the proverbial ice green cuke, the not-a-hair-outta-place smart cookie who wouldn't be caught dead in any kerfuffle. You - sharp suited, Jimmy Choo'd brigadier - buffed so tight you can look down and see your own cheesy grin nervously reflecting back up atcha, as you sashay click clackety down the polished corridors of a safe, safe life.

It means that awful instant when you know you could lose it all, but at the same time you might, might, just this once, get away with it by the skin of your pearly whites and everything could, please Jesus Mary & Joseph, Allah, Vishnu, Buddha and anyone else up there listening: please remember I was good last Christmas! - snap into place and sacre bleu! incroyable! - work out. But you're really not sure at all. You find yourself getting damp from cold sweat in embarrassing places. Your breathing is shallowed, if you breathe at all. You cannot even begin to count the number of consequent failures that will tumble one against the other like a stack of hapless dominoes, each "timberrrrr" reverberating irrevocably and devastatingly against the next, larger catastrophe. Intuitively you know exactly what they all are, but you won't have time to go there.

And all that, in one nano second.

So what will you do? The moment is upon you. You're centre stage, smack in the middle of this sudden onslaught of limelight and the whole world comes to a roaring standstill to hear your next, mind numbing utterance. You teeter, Jimmy Choos notwithstanding, on the knife edge of eternal ignominy and regret of a closed and defeated mind; or of doors that will open and open, like ever-increasing ripples on a calm turquoise lake after a small pebble has been dropped. The Diem is to be Carpe'd or forever hold its unpeace.

That's risk. There will be no back up for your back up. So. What'll it be? Play safe and survive? Or leap in faith and come alive?

The choice, comrade, is yours.