A risk.

In a course that I'm taking right now (Creative Writing) we have to keep an "reflection journal". I decided to share some of my observations here.

A risk.

This word was the first thing I noticed on the board while waiting for a class to start. A risk. Honestly, I was very curious about this word and at first I thought it was some author’s name. But then John decoded the word and started talking about the writer’s risk to share his thoughts, his experience, and his feelings with the reader. And it hit me how much this notion of risk appeals to me just today, just now, just in this moment of my life. My today class was a risk, my coming to this country was a risk, my decision to work for Macalester was a risk, and my choice of this course was a risk, my every communication with students or with a professor is about taking a risk. There is no third option with taking a risk – you either take it or not.

Taking a risk is the road without the end, but every time you have to step over your fear, over your shyness, over your lack of self-confidence as the first time. Especially, when you are different. When you look different. When your language is different. When your school experience is different. When your family is different. When your history is different. When the things you believe in are different. Different from all other people around you. You do that step to enter the class room, you take a pen to write your first paper (though you are scared to a death that a professor will find tons of grammar or syntax mistakes in your essay or just won’t understand what you wanted to say), you smile to someone in a class and you feel that you did something big, that now you are stronger than a second before. And most of the times you see that a result is worth all your efforts and that actually your fears were quite groundless.

We take risks every day (simply to ask a shop assistant to help you), but artists (writers, painters, composers etc.) take bigger risks than other people because they take a risk to show everyone their world, their version of a world. It’s more than just sit at home with your best friend, drinking some beer and sharing sad details about your last break-up. It’s about sharing your whole world, about showing what you are to other people. Nobody can predict what a reader (a viewer, a listener) will do with this world – hate it or adore it, worship it or destroy it, use it as an ideal to improve his life or as an excuse to spoil it, or just laugh at it…