4 Days to Go: Consuming Everything ...

So, I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, What the Dog Saw (I love everything he writes), and there is a chapter in it about what he refers to as "consuming risk."  It's all about how there will always be NASA explosions, and car crashes, and other such massive, systemic disasters, because we human beings tend to "consume" risk.  That is, we might make a safety advance in one area, especially after a disaster such as a space shuttle explosion when we investigate "what went wrong," but then we go ahead and use the extra safety we have secured to take an equal risk in another arena.  Obviously, these are not necessarily consciously calculated risks, but somehow we seem to settle on a level of risk-taking that is comfortable, and then revert to it, regardless of how many safety procedures we have in place.  So, for instance, we make many safetly advances in car design - such as air bags, anti-lock brakes, etc, but then we raise the speed limit to the point where there are essentially as many fatal accidents as there were before the aforementioned safety advances.  But at least the rest of us are getting to our destinations more quickly.

Malcolm Gladwell explains the whole thing much better and in much more depth, but when I read it, it touched on something that I have thought a lot about in my own life.  Quite often I will attempt to get really organized and be totally on top of something, only to let some other thing fall apart.  Or I take up exercise, only to begin eating candy like crazy.  I maintain a careful budget for some period of time, only to blow a bunch of money on something not even on the budget.  So I zero out, not making too much progress.  All through school - high school, college, and law school - I essentially had the exact same GPA.  It was a pretty good one - not awesome, but good enough for me to feel like I was working really hard but not killing myself.  But it takes some kind of unconscious strategy to stay right around the same GPA, or the same weight, or keep my house at about the same level of controlled chaos.  So I really do believe the theory of risk consumption - I've been living it all my life.

But, sometimes, progress must be made.  It seems that every now and then, when we reverse the model, we get to move ahead two spaces.  In other words, if we put the risk first, rather than waiting for some small advance before backsliding into the risk, we can win big.  You could call it faith, or stupidity, or a stroke of luck, but sometimes jumping off the cliff is actually how you find out if you can do a thing.  (I realize this is starting to sound like a long-winded explanation of the expression "nothing ventured, nothing gained," so I'll wrap this up...)  For me, it seems like when it comes time to make a "big" decision - what career to pursue, whom to marry, where to live, whether it's time to start a family - rational analysis doesn't work.  The fallout from that kind of decision is so complicated, so completely beyond the power to foresee the future, that I'm not really even making a decision so much as just crossing my fingers and hoping I have what it takes to make it work.  (And if something blows up in my face, I can then go back and painstakingly re-evaluate the risk - now with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight - and tell myself that I should have seen X, or that I will never make that mistake again.)

Of course, people ask all the time about how we decided to adopt, or why Ethiopia, and I say things that seem to make sense to them and to myself.  But the truth is, I'm not really sure.  We just started thinking about it, and then we started doing it, and now here we are.  And all along the way, as we filed paperwork, made doctors' appointments, painted the nursery, paid thousands of dollars to Gladney, I'm not even sure I could really explain why we were doing it.

And then one day in November we got a phone call, and a picture, and a little story about Shurube, and that was that.  And all of the sudden, it all made sense.  The risk was consumed by the lovely reality of a baby; and it didn't look like a risk anymore at all, but just a really great decision we made.