The Recklessly Daring

People often say, "Safety First."
They’re lying. (*1)

If we truly prioritized safety above all else, we wouldn’t be exploring Mars. We wouldn’t be launching manned rockets, we wouldn’t drive cars, and we certainly wouldn’t participate in a sport as inherently dangerous as aerial silks.

Instead of spinning in the air, staying on the ground is undeniably safer, whether measured by potential or kinetic energy. Your safety would be best guaranteed by never leaving your room, just idling away on your bed.

But for those who stay shut inside, miracles, destiny, luck, and that life-changing encounter remain forever out of reach.

We can only do aerial silks (like any other human endeavor) because we don’t treat "Safety First" as a literal, absolute creed. There must be something we value more than safety.

So in reality, when we say "Safety First," what we actually mean would be something like: "Before doing anything (i.e., as the first step in the sequence), recognize the realistic dangers; eliminate unnecessary risks; and then, take a calculated gamble."
What we should take is not blind risk, but this calculated bet. Someone trying to push 120% of their actual ability out of nowhere is simply a fool who can’t do math. At the same time, you shouldn't fill that 100% with calculation alone. You solidify the 99% with cold, hard logic, and leave the final 1% open for the heat of the moment. It is in that 1% gap that miracles and luck find the room to enter.

The 99% of preparation involves imagining the worst-case scenario. It means following every safety protocol without cutting corners. It means inspecting and maintaining your gear.
For us aerialists, stacking these safety procedures is not really a sign of cowardice, but a brave act of preparation, like leveling and lengthening a runway as far as it will go, so that we can charge into the unknown at maximum speed.

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However, there are, rare and fleeting exceptions, that force that 1% gap wide open.

Humans are not purely logical machines. No matter how precisely we calculate risk, the spark of life often exists outside those calculations.

Calculating every move within the predictable bounds of your sandbox, the "Safety First" style may grant you a rational victory: the win where you yield 49 points to the opponent as long as you take 51. It’s a defensive, steady, proven tactic that is hard to defeat.
But what truly makes our hearts tremble is the gamble where the risk is incalculable: the "0 or 100," the "kill or be killed" stakes. Life becomes interesting precisely because you don't know what will happen to you once you throw yourself into it.

Or perhaps it’s the sheer audacity of youth, lacking the experience to even calculate risk. Those who are simply, breathtakingly daring. They appear out of nowhere and bury the accelerator into the floorboards without a flicker of hesitation. That dangerous blindness sometimes births an originality that mocks every calculated risk.

I'm tempted to call it nothing but immature, foolish, reckless daring—and I must be right in that—yet for that very reason, they attract all kinds of vivid encounters, racing straight ahead, while clad in contradictions; contempt and envy, denial and affirmation, swallowing miracles, destiny, luck, and misfortune alike.

When I think about it, perhaps we prepare our safe runways every day because we are longing for that irrational passion to eventually burn them all down.
The moment you let go of the silks from 80 feet (25 meters) up and surrender your body to gravity. Perhaps we stack our safety procedures day after day just to encounter that beautiful miscalculation that renders all calculations moot.

If that’s the case, then despite our shared admonitions against the reckless, we were always destined to follow that daring impulse: the path that made our hearts truly dance. That was all we ever could have done, from the very beginning.

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*1) Actually, my statement that it’s a lie is also a lie. What I really mean is that the slogan is prone to misunderstanding. It's more natural to view the "First" in "Safety First" as a sequence of procedures, rather than a hierarchy of values. Much like how US Steel once rationally escaped a crisis by placing safety at the very entrance of their process.