"Do You Want to Live Forever?!"

Raise your hand if you recognize the title quote. It's from Sandahl Bergman’s Valeria, Conan the Barbarian’s lost love, inviting him to melee.

Valeria was only in the first movie, and after she took an arrow for Schwarzenegger's Conan, the poor wrecked superbarbarian was doomed to search for her through the rest of the series unrewarded. She was a thief and a warrior of skills equal to his own, and she captivated him completely. Standing before a lethal drop into the evil king’s domain, going for the gold, he falters and she taunts him with smile and broadsword: “Do you want to live forever”? For me, Valeria is the feminine face of risk, where the rush is in the odds and the action, and may I never be too timid to call it up once again.

In an important way, the risks we take as older people are stacked for or against success by the sum of our experiences: the more we have the better the odds.  So if you were a victim of your Terrible Twenties you may have more “common sense” than someone with less, um, practice sorting people’s intentions and separating opportunity from disaster. If you remember, damn!  that was a young person’s game - very expensive emotionally, physically, and/or financially when you lost, and in my case I lost a lot.  But even the biggest losses instilled in me knowledge of outcomes that now through the prism of all these years solidify into wisdom.  And so they were not really losses; maybe I think of them as battles lost to win the war.

This is not to say that you should not take risks if you haven’t much before, but it would be wise to look fully and cautiously into where you may be jumping; evil kings abound. The world is full of scam after scam enticing us to separate from our money, talents, or power, more than ever before now that we are growing more frail.  If you don’t have any money, you can be relieved on this count, but we all have other things of value that can be lost, including innocence and self-respect.

And yet, there is the thrill of taking a risk.  It does not need to be a large one, and it does not need to be a lethal one.  But if we don’t take any at all (like perhaps not going to coffee with that nice widower who asked you out or not going to a group meeting you find interesting?), if we never do things that are new or unknown, we will smile a lot less and our wits get no practice!  The most important thing, as Valeria’s shining eyes reveal as she jumps over the side and into the fray, is to have the rush, to feel the excitement of doing something you want to in spite of reasons to not.

The more afraid you are, the more threatening and strange things become. As we age, we imagine more things can hurt us and so we are more cautious and less adventuresome.  I believe it is important to keep excitement with us, to keep a sense of warring for our own happiness, the opportunity for risk.  The less we fear,  en-joyment we will find.