Reverb 13: Day 5. Risk and challenge. Oh yeah.

1. What was the greatest risk you took in 2013? What was the outcome?

2. Challenge | Did you take on a new challenge in 2013?  What was it?  Are there challenges you deliberately avoided?  What do you want to do to challenge yourself in 2014?

So I've been thinking about risk and challenge today. I can find challenges aplenty, but risk? I don't know that I am a risk-taker very much, at least not any more. I mostly analyze (probably to death) situations and choices before I take actions, especially when those choices are hard or impossible to reverse. And sometimes I wait until the way forward is impossible to miss, until there is such a clear indication of what must happen.

I suppose the greatest risk I took in 2013 was the surgery I had in December 2012. Walking had become painful and I knew that not doing something about it was going to end up with me in a wheelchair eventually, and I am way too young for that. So while the risk was literally taken at the end of 2012 with the surgery, the rehab was up to me to do in 2013. And it was both a risk and a challenge: I had spent so much time accommodating the bad foot that my whole body was off, and I had to learn how to stand, how to walk, how to get up and down, and so on pretty much all over. 

 When I began walking in the boot, I lurched, literally. When I  went into a shoe and used the walker, I was hesitant to let the walker go. I faithfully went to rehab twice a week and did everything they threw at me, including skipping. I haven't been able to skip for a long time, hurt foot or not,  but I skipped down the gym floor, awkwardly and unsteadily, knowing they'd catch me if I became totally unbalanced and began to fall. That was a risk. And a challenge.

I am careful where I place my feet and aware of my balance these days, but walking is not painful anymore. My new challenge is to resume going to the gym to work on my balance and core strength, and to be faithful to the commitment. 

My other challenge for 2014 is to continue to detach from the issues surrounding my daughter, eventually coming to a place where I can be loving and kind without the fear and anger and worry that has been so prevalent in that relationship this year, especially.  I'll get there.