“If you put yourself in danger, you perish in it,” the saying goes. But is that so? The saying could be from Spahn Jens or from Söder Markus, but it is much older. What exactly did the Biblical Proverb Knocker mean to tell us? Stay at home, don’t take any chances, then you’ll be 120?
But do we want that? In addition, Blaise Pascal was wrong with his often quoted sentence that all human misfortune results from the fact that he cannot be alone in a room. The man didn’t know about the need to work from home, and he probably couldn’t even spell lockdown! And the statistics showing that most serious accidents happen in the home were not yet available online at the time.
In times when the word risk is used in such an inflationary way and neighboring countries are declared high-risk or even high-risk areas every week, it is high time to break a lance! Where would we be if our ancestors had stayed in the room and taken no chances? Without the courageous Italians Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo Vespucci, without the bold British James Cook, our world would still only consist of a bit of Eurasia.
Where were the Germans actually when they discovered the world? Well, Georg Forster went with Cook, after all he drew exotic animals and plants and wrote a book about this risky trip. But then the captain himself was cheated when he landed too much on the shores of Hawaii. “So what?”, He would say, “after all, I’ve mapped half the Pacific. Should I die in bed there?”
Nowadays travelers are relieved of the risk on all sides, if we even venture out. If the car dies, the ADAC picks us up, a volcano erupts, the EU package travel guidelines apply, we get sick, is there the travel cancellation insurance. Better safe than sorry. But is it also exciting, exciting, enlightening? Rather not.
After all, there are still people who consciously take risks because they feel more alive than in the home office. And we’re not talking about those who book a flight to the high-risk area Mallorca or Ibiza. Rather from those who climb high mountains, cycle to Uzbekistan or strap on a paraglider to see the world from a different perspective.
Most of them come back safe and sound, but something happens to some of them, they priced that in. And death doesn’t always wait. A mountain climber recently fell five meters deep into a crevasse in Tyrol and got his leg so unhappy in the ice that the mountain rescue team had to hammer him free with a jackhammer. Except for a hypothermia, he was unharmed. Also in Tyrol, two tandem paragliders got caught in a cable car and got stuck – unharmed – on it. What does that tell us? Whoever puts himself in danger has something to tell.