Come to think of it, I was a hypocrite — preaching adventure while clinging to the shores for safety. When the moment came to leap, mathematics of risk paralyzed me. Those of us who serve an ideal can’t always be the ideal: I was pontificating rage I could not muster myself. So I retreated. From the monastery observing others dive into the unknown, one by one.

But I'm taking more risks this year. Stillness, I realized, might cost me more than a leap. At 23, the price of failure is low: time can cushion even the wildest mistakes. With age, risks become more expensive as the leeway to course-correct narrows. Meanwhile, their rewards dwindle much like the diminishing value of experiences outlined in Die With Zero. A risk taken now might be invaluable: the thrill of discovery, the stories to tell decades later, the change you never knew you needed. To wait too long is to find the bounty has reduced to potential unspent and unlived.

Then there's this machine of working life that has begun to hum around me. Day folds into day when fueled by an inertial routine (and I thought I knew in college). Without risks, I see now, life threatens to flatten itself into a cornfield that stretches unbroken to the horizon. I see someone remarking, years from now, “You used to be lonely and lost, but so ambitious,” after I’ve acquiesced to all that life throws at me. Wouldn’t it be absurd if, when I play it back, I realize that was it? That there’s a point from which my life was decided? A point at which the grand map of sprawling paths collapses into one dim routine? One straight line through the cornfield?

I must leap, I decided, if only to shatter that plain.

That’s why, even though I know infatuation is a mental illness, I still jumped off the cliff by which my monastery stood. Because someday what’s true will turn out to be false. Someday what you loved, you won't love anymore. Who you loved, won’t love you anymore. Then, recalling today’s flushed cheeks and tosses and turns and screaming, crying, throwing up, only leaves one lament for one missed opportunity.

So I lean in. I shoot my shot, and think I had it. I used to, every day, wake up thanking god I was alone, now I just wake up and thank god.

The feeling of being caught up — Gracie Abrams puts it perfectly: “Thinking you’re right when you’re probably wrong,” of “God, I’m actually invested, think I really want this, I’m not even kidding,” of “Look at me now, said I wouldn’t do it but I hunted you down.” I can’t say if this is good or bad, as most things in life can only be evaluated in hindsight. But it’s something, and that something is alive. Am I desperate to feel? Am I easily convinced? Is anything, at this point, ready to change my life? Or is this it? Has this been who I am all along?

Either way, I'm surprised to find that I’m actually a very flexible person, that I have such a capacity to love. Never have I ever thought that I can change all my plans, deal in the taboo, and even offer myself up for rejection, all for something as elusive as it is illogical. Paid the price of real intimacy; been wounded, actually and acutely. It cracked a hole open through my body, and somehow, I’m still ok. It’s proof, I hope, of resilience.

I took risks when I punctuated the monotony of work with monthly trips: The result was 345 hours in the air, 110 hours more than last year. I took risks when I woke up sweating in that hotel bed, silently muttering, “I’m not convinced.” But it wasn’t an argument. Also when I dozed off in a club. Frames slowed to a montage as I started to study the lights and analyze other people’s sobriety. I thought it would, but osmosis failed to funnel the sea of relatively higher concentration of substances into me. Those risks proved something: it’s better to have tasted and hate than to fear tasting at all. Even brownouts aren’t as terrible as I imagined. I might not recall much, but I was happy? I felt love.

Some principles, it’s ok to lose them. Some pacts can be amended. When liberated, you get a chance to re-ask the big questions. Who do you want to be? What life do you want to live? What is the person you want to love? As opposed to being firm all the way, it makes for a far better story if you tremble and rethink as you’re tapped gently by fate.

At my absolute lowest this year, I was staring into the pacific ocean. MUNA’s “Kind of Girl” was playing: “I like telling stories, But I don’t have to write them in ink, I can still change the end.” That delusional cry — I can change the end — reminds me that it is still possible: there is another way to chase out of the cornfield. Indeed, every leap I took, every time I spoke out, every principle I abandoned, everything I said I wouldn’t do and then did, I am rewriting the end.

This is the time to dip into risks with fewer calculations and less retreat. Don't ask why, just feel and be. Dive into the deep end knowing the risk is drowning. Fear, but jump anyway.

In Chiang Mai, I was jolting up and down the Grab bike, holding on for dear life as the wind slit my hair into a thousand shimmering strands of light. It took me back to the nights when I drove down CA-60 at 11 p.m. The part by Montebello always had no streetlights nor cars. My windows were down. I was screaming “I’m a shotgun running away” into the void and hearing only the wind’s wail in return. I love the wind, love the freedom of the road. I always loved the idea of risk. Now I’m in it.