I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, focused on launching a writing and advisory business around personal finance for GenXers. I’m blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Being an adult in love means being adult about love and loving. Psychological adulthood—maturity—is letting love in carefully and showing it responsibly. Spiritual adulthood consists of expanding our love so that it is unbounded, a practice requiring recklessness. Since love sits in us someplace between trust and fear, a commitment to love requires both daring to trust and disregarding our fear, both risks we are willing to take when we love someone. Loving is often scary. This is why we have to become reckless in practicing it. Recklessness is defined as a letting go of concern about dangerous consequences to ourselves. We become reckless when we are so firm and focused in our intention that we are no longer held back by a fear of what seems threatening. This helps us give love unconditionally. (There is no such thing as conditional love—that is not love, only giving approval when the other is pleasing to us.)
David Richo, How to Be an Adult In Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing it Recklessly
Some of the best things in life are scary. They require recklessness to fully enjoy them: skiing, making art, falling in love.
My favorite Rumi poem echoes this theme:
Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.
Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.
Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.
Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God’s favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.— Jalal al-Din Rumi
I wonder if being reckless in starting a business might be helpful?