I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I was thinking about recklessness this week, because the Rumi poem I’m planning to use to source the epigraph for my upcoming memoir contrasts recklessness with reason:
Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed
The word “reckless” comes from Old English receleas, meaning careless or heedless. It’s built from reccan (to care, take heed, pay attention) plus the suffix -less (meaning without). It literally means “without care.”
It is not related to the word wreck, which comes from the Old Norse wrek or Old English wrecan, meaning to drive out, avenge, punish, or cast ashore.
The word reckon is rooted in the verb reccan upon which reckless is based. But it’s from the Old English gerecenian which means “to recount, relate, explain.” Over time it shifted from telling or recounting to calculating or considering to supposing or thinking. In British English, reckon often means to suppose or think while in American English it’s used more colloquially as in “I reckon he’s right.”
No one uses the verb reck at all but you could. It could mean to care about something. You could be reckful instead of reckless.
I’m thinking of a way of using the idea of reckfulness to illustrate everything that’s wrong with how people today approach romantic relationships. I’ve already started sketching an outline and it seems to be a fruitful direction. Excited!