I am sitting at my desk in my office looking through the window at an apocalyptic sky full of smoke and ashes from the fires which are currently raging in Portugal. On the hill opposite to where I live, tall eucalyptus trees are moving with the wind. Australia is far behind but I am still looking at it in some ways. These non native trees which were imported decades ago make up for the majority of the forest land in Portugal today. As any Australian or Portuguese person would know, Eucalyptus trees are highly flammable as well as a potent allergen. And while forests and houses are being swallowed by the flames, people and animals being killed, we bear witness to the consequences of misplacing nature for economic reasons, letting an unmanaged situation spread out of control without assessing the risks and not taking care of the land the way it needed it. Nature has its unrelenting way of showing us where imbalances lie. More broadly, life constantly shows us where equilibrium needs to be restored.
For many reasons, risk and safety are common topics of conversation in my household and my husband, who happens to be an expert on the subject, often mentions people’s lack of imagination when it comes to risk. I remember not quite understanding the statement at first. What he means is that individuals and more so groups of people, can’t stretch their imagination enough to fathom that there can be risky outcomes to their behaviours and decisions which therefore can lead them to be careless. They struggle to stretch themselves to conceive the unthinkable and rely on the unlikelihood of something happening rather than the consequences of the eventuation. Risk is fascinating because it is intertwined with culture and human behaviour whilst requiring specific skills and faculties to be handled appropriately.
Some of us are more attuned to risks or simply more risk minded than others. It’s a balancing act between making a fair assessment without falling into inhibiting paranoia where we see danger everywhere. We need enough information to be able to make a decision and if we don’t know, we should be curious, research, ask questions, check, have a contingency plan - if possible. And this can be applied to pretty much any area of life.
I believe my appetite and enthusiasm for risk based thinking derive from my years in Australia. People who have never been to Australia tend to talk about it in two ways. Either as a projected El Dorado, some kind of heaven on Earth where they dream to travel to and where they believe life is better. Or as a dangerous place where everything can kill you (snakes, spiders, sharks, bushfires, rip currents and so on). Both are obviously not a fair representation. From my time on the East coast of Australia, I’d say that I learned that nature has its way and when it’s disrespected, damaged, neglected, destroyed, it shows signs of dysregulation and takes no prisoners in the process. It’s brutal, violent, scary. In the last three years I lived there, we witnessed extreme fires with failed responses from the authorities which in some places forced people to flee to the shore and seek refuge on boats to avoid being burned alive. We also saw floods submerge entire towns. One we had visited, in a matter of days, was erased from the map - as if it had never existed. We’d fear hailstorms with hailstones as big as golf balls which can destroy your car in a minute. We’d never walk barefoot in the bush or grassy areas. We’d never leave shoes outside. We’d always check our shoes before putting them on. Looking back, risk management was part of life.
Last night when I realised that two of our Portuguese friends, who had just bought a house, were facing a blazing wall of flames 200 metres away from their brand new home, I felt a sense of dread and déjà-vu. We had just finished dinner, we were rotating between the local news on TV and the ones on the internet to try to get a sense of where things were overall. I cleared the space in front of me at the table and started to do some energy work on the situation and prayed. I am not a fire expert, I am used to working with people, but it didn’t matter. I threw in all I could in terms of protecting my friends’ home, them, their neighbours and blocking the fire to further move towards their house. At this point, we didn’t know if they still had a chance to evacuate if the fire was closing on them and it was terrifying. As I am writing, my friends, their house and their doggies are okay. They had a sleepless night, they communicated with one word messages such as: “safe”. That’s all that matters.
Often when a crisis like a bushfire takes place, there are multiple contributing root causes and factors, not a single failure. If I was to use the appropriate vocabulary, the fire is the hazard / the threat. Both words can be used interchangeably. The risk and the intensity of the risk (low/high) are the consequences of what happens when we come in contact with the threat (in this case, the potential fire). All risk management is about dealing with the threat. We can’t assess the risk unless we have identified the threat. In Portugal, just like in Australia, bushfire is a known threat. Still, very little is done to reduce the risk even though there are concrete preventative safety features which could have reduced the spread of the current catastrophic situation: Planting different types of trees, like oaks or pines which contain more water. Forest management with fire breaks where areas are cleared so fires can’t jump and spread. Adequate local fire fighting equipment and resources. Not building houses near highly dense woodland if the land isn’t maintained to minimise the threat. Each one of these risk controls could have reduced the likelihood of the threat and the intensity of the risk.
Being aware of a threat and taking the necessary actions to avoid being confronted to it is directly related to one of my favoured topics: seeing things for what they are, not what we would like them to be. To talk about this, risk management has its own language and speaks about “blindness” of which there are four types:
Blindness: it designates an unidentified hazard. There is a hazard but we don’t see it as one, our perception doesn’t see it as something potentially dangerous. For instance, a rusted rung on a ladder that we haven’t seen or noticed or that we saw but didn’t think it’s a problem until it breaks when we step on it. This type of blindness is the most common one, it’s the biggest failure in risk management: when we fail to identify the hazard / the threat in the first place and therefore can’t put any controls in place.
Inattentional blindness: this is when a hazard is identified. We know it’s a hazard but we don’t want to see it, we downplay it or give in to wishful thinking such as: “it’ll be fine”. This type of blindness tends to be a bigger problem in group think. For example, in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, everyone convinced themselves the O-rings wouldn’t be a problem despite the warnings of some engineers whose dissenting voices were shut down and ignored for largely political and economic reasons. I’ll give another example much closer to everyone’s home: the MRNA vaccines.
Change blindness: This is when something is changing or deteriorating gradually and isn’t identified as problematic until it’s too late. If you’ve heard about the ‘boiling frog syndrome’, this is a good illustration of this.
The gorilla (for real): this is the completely unforeseen hazard. The one in a million. The ‘struck by lightning on a sunny day’. The gorilla hides in the bushes, jumps out, rips an arm off and disappears - very unlikely, very rare, unforeseeable.
For most people, talking about risk and safety isn’t fun; it’s to look at the glass half empty, it’s to sound pessimistic. The truth is, when we talk about risk management, we also talk about opportunity, to better ensure the chances of success by preventing possible failure. Personally, I believe that risk management is part of being responsible for ourselves and others. It’s part of cultivating discernment and accurate perception which we so desperately need. It requires us to ask the right questions and be open to the various answers, including the ones we don’t want to hear. It demands curiosity.
Curiosity is about being interested in something unknown to us. It’s also an impulse towards the unmanifest. As Rupert Spira said beautifully, when we are curious about someone, someone’s life, someone’s career, “it’s an excuse to know each other, to express love for each other”. Curiosity is an expression of care. I mention this because it moved me deeply when I heard it said this way and it also answered a question I had asked myself many times. For fourteen years I lived on the other side of the planet in relation to where I was born. No one was coming to visit except for my mum, so no one who knew me from my life prior to living abroad knew anything about my new life. Still, each time I came back to visit those who weren’t visiting me, no one asked any questions, only I did. And each time, I asked myself why am I so bothered by this? Why aren't people asking me anything about me, about my life or just about life there in general? And this question not only had remained unanswered, it persisted and so did the feeling of unease and muted upset. But last week, I received my answer: lack of curiosity is an absence of love, an absence of care. Simple as that.
The world, our loved ones, the people we care about, all deserve our curiosity. Our discernment requires our curiosity. Our safety needs our curiosity and our imagination.
If we feel there is nothing we can do, we can always send a message to someone to manifest and express our care, we can always pray for someone.
If curiosity is an excuse to express love. Please, be curious.
It might even keep you safe.
Thank you for reading.
Mahé