Why Do We Take Risks?
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
November 3, 2025 · Episode 11 · 57:29
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/why-do-we-take-risks/

Transcript is auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly formatted; it may contain errors.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today I'll be talking about taking unnecessary risks and living to tell about it. Um why do we do it? What do we get out of it? What's going on? And why do I enjoy watching it so much? That's today on the Firestone Files.

Have you ever thought about taking big risks just for the fun of it, the rush? Maybe you uh just want to say that you did it. Whatever it is, um sometimes we chase these moments and to be honest, I enjoy telling the stories uh down the road about how I did it and how I nearly died doing it and all of those sorts of things. Well, if that's you, that's what we're going to be talking about here today. Um, one of the things that I've uh I've kind of caught myself doing um is watching reels on like I mean my generation's Facebook. I know some people are watching Tik Tok or Instagram or whatever.

I t typically am going on Facebook chatting with people or you know seeing what's going on in people's lives and they have these reels on there. I I tell you, the reason they have these reels, I've become convinced, is because they're addictive. They get us watching. And I tell you, time can just fly and go by while you're watching these reels. Can be hooked literally for hours. And uh then you feel bad about yourself when you're done. I haven't gotten anything done. You know, all that kind of thing. And so um what is it about these things? Well, at least in part, and this is a bit of a a confession, I guess, or some autobiography.

Um, one of the things I like to watch on them is risktaking in various forms. Um, and it seems like the algorithm knows this. So, I I have the things I typically have on my reel. I I I'm sorry to say, are things like uh squirrel suit suit jumps. Um, parachute stunts, bungee jumping often comes up. Cliff and bridge jumps, you know, these kind where they seem to be way up in the air. They throw a rock over the edge, it lands in the water. I guess that's so they know where they're going to hit and then they jump off themselves and uh hopefully don't hit anything under the water.

I'm assuming that they go down and check that first. Um, anyway, you know, whatever the case, I'm not sure I could do it anyway. I, you know, I get up 10, 20 feet, you know, even at a at a pool that's got a nice high-rise and I'm like, dang, I'm not sure I can do it. These people are in nature and who knows what's underneath that water. And there they go jumping in again. You've got free climbing that's going on. These are where these climbers go without ropes and uh you know the all they've got are their their little bag of chalk, you know, and their own hands and feet and their skills and off they go. I'm assuming there's a certain percentage of these people that lose a handhold and die. I don't know. I haven't I haven't seen that, but it it's one of the reasons I watch is to just watch these deathdeying things that are on these reels.

Um, parkour is another one of these things that's been a big one the last 20 years or so where people are jumping from heights that I didn't know you could survive. You I figured you break a leg every time, but no, they somehow roll, get up, pop up, and then do another one. Um, one thing after another and I'm hooked. I think the algorithm algorithm knows that I'm hooked and um this stuff shows up on my feed all the time. And I tell you, once I start watching, I might as well get some popcorn, kick my legs up, and uh know that the next few hours I'm booked because I'm hooked.

And that's just the way it goes, I guess. These addictive reels u of of deathdeying feats. Well, the question for me, I mean, I'm not saying that's good, bad. You know, I'm just I'm I'm just saying that what it it says something about the human condition, at least my condition. And if you're like me, maybe you have some of that stuff pop up on your feed as well. Um, my question is, why do people do this? Is it wise to do this? Where is the um line between boldness, courage, fearlessness, um having a certain set of skills with recklessness.

You know, I'm I'm sure I'll talk about Aristotle's virtue ethics at one point somewhere down the road. But courage in Aristotle's way of thinking is the mean between two vices. One is cowardness where you never do anything risky at all and the other is what he calls recklessness or you know the the sort of surplus of courage where wisdom is out the window and it's no longer courage but some malignant form of courage. um you know, how do we draw that line and uh why do we take it to the edge so very often and why does that interest us? I mean, these are some of the questions that uh prompt this podcast today.

I'm just curious about these things and I thought I would do some thinking on it and kind of share my thoughts with you. you know in the end what draws us to these wild videos and what drives someone to take these sort of risks um and and so forth. Now the philosophy that comes to my mind with regards to this kind of risktaking is um called existentialism really it's a n it came out of the 19th century in response to my favorite philosopher Emanuel Kant.

Now, those of you who have watched my podcast or plan to watch in the future going to hear a lot about Emanuel Kant, that's where I did I did my PhD on Kant and I've written a number of books on Kant and I've mentioned this before, but one of the reasons I studied Kant is he's such a pivotal figure. He's sitting there right between this very influential modern enlightenment period, the late 1700s.

He died in 1804 and uh um the 19th and 20th century which looks a lot more like contemporary philosophy to people contest sort of the watershed of all these systems of thought rationalism in and empiricism in particular and he gives rise to a whole lot of philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Um, I challenge you to go into a library into the philosophy section, pick up a philosophy book, look in the table of contents and in the index and not find the name of Emanuel K. That is how important he is to modern thought, contemporary thought. Anyway, I mentioned that because he his philosophy is kind of the preface to a number of other philosophies in the 19th century.

Now, again, you're going to hear me o in the course of, you know, the the the weeks to follow, months to follow, years to follow, lambasting 19th century philosophy. And there's a reason for that. A lot of the well-known philosophers out of the 19th century have caused all sorts of havoc in the 20th century with the consequences of their thinking. It's not so much I would suggest to you that there aren't truths in their thought. There are plenty of truths in the thought of people like Schopenhau, Nietze, Marx, Foyerbach, um even some of the psychologists like Freud and others. Plenty of truth to be found there.

The problem with 19th century philosophy is that students don't know where the truth ends and to to a hammer everything looks like a nail and that's kind of the way these individual truths of the 19th century philosophy work their way out in the 20th and 21st century students I've seen it over and over again study the philosophy let's say of Friedrich Nichze they're they're enraptured by uh some of his critiques, critiques of Christianity, critiques of modernity, critiques of uh um uh uh the status quo and the political philosophy of the day and they and they take that and his sort of positive contributions to those discussions and create infinity with them and it becomes a worldview in which it critiques everything and all truth and there really isn't any truth and truth is totally subjective.

morality is no longer objective but something that is a power play. And this happens over and over again with students who get sort of um into these 19th century philosophers. They can't get out. It's like a black hole. They start you know reading thus speak thera and uh you know beyond good and evil and and other other thinkers. And he's not alone. I mean this is a problem with a lot of these 20th century Karl Marx for example.

People get into the sort of good critiques that Markx makes of capitalism and other things and they think it covers everything and that Marx is thus right in his worldview and is worthy of following. And uh that's just not true. We have kind of lost the art if you will of being able to determine truth uh when we see it but then limit it, critique it, appropriate it appropriately. We've lost that art. We dive in and we can't get out. And I've seen young people in that regard um uh dig into these philosophies over 25 year career. We lose a student or two to 19th century thought and it's not uncommon at all.

Um okay, that's all a preface. That's that's the context of the 19th century in a nutshell. There's this Kantian thing that happens. Then there's this German idealistic movement. This is Victa Shelling and Hegel principally. These are the last great systematizers of thought in the 19th century. And one of the there's a couple of uh there's a philosophy that emerges that I really want to talk about here today called existentialism. Existentialism is a reaction against the globalization if you will of German idealism. The individual is lost. argues the existentialists in the idealism of let's let's say Friedrich Hegel. Hegel believes that thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis are the driving features of all of reality.

That's including the individual. that we are in a sense part of this ongoing uh ongoing um attempt for philosophy to um uh God to come to self-standing in and through philosophy and um there's a lot that can be said there but the bottom line is that in the grand system of Hegel um some of the existentialist who will emerge argue that the individual is lost. The philosopher in particular I want to sort of you know focus in on is a philosopher named Saurin Kirkugore. Kirkagore went to Hegel's lectures apparently and began um questioning the globalization of philosophy that somehow the individual is lost in the in the in the way the absolute comes to self-standing in and through us.

um he rejected these grand systems and instead focused on uh individual self-actualization. He wrote a book called stages on life's way in which he does a deep dive in how the individual comes to maturity. Now, everybody is different and there is this isn't a formula for everybody, but it's a um highly descriptive account of how individuals grow. Not necessarily in a sort of a gradual way. Sometimes it can be gradual, but often times it's through a sort of paradigm shift or what he calls a leap of faith.

And so you'll see behind me I've got a little picture up here that sort of helps to understand what Kerkugore is saying. Typically human beings grow up in this you know begin in this estate uh uh phase and the estate um is the person who is pleasure driven. You know it's it's it's it's like little kids who just want to eat candy all the time. I've got a uh I've got a friend um Alex Pierce got a one of his daughters named Abby. She just loves candy and she can talk me into giving her candy like all the time. We go out, hey, can we have a slushie?

We go out here and you know, what do you think about some ice cream? Uh she's not alone. She comes to my mind because she's driven by her um you know her immediate sense perception and for Sa and Kerkugore that's really all of us in our early phases of development. He calls it the the estate phase that is purpose uh pleasure is the driving purpose of our life. Life is about overcoming boredom. Again, anybody who's watched kids knows that one of the major problems with kids, you know, that is that, hey, I'm bored. What can we do?

Now, I like to raise my game when I'm around kids and really push the envelope, if you will, and do fun stuff because I know how they're wired and um I know that those are teachable moments and there's a lot more teachable moments in their youth and so I want to take advantage of that and take them on journeys and have fun and do stuff. But it is in a sense playing upon the fact that they are easily bored.

Um, and that's kind of like all of us in our early stages of development. In fact, Surin Kirkugore likens this to the Don Juan. He called Don Juan figure who is out for his next conquest. He's trying to overcome boredom and he is looking out for his next conquest. And that's kind of like all of us in our in our in our younger days where we're looking for the next thing to uh capture our attention. And um that works its way out until we realize that that isn't very meaningful. It's sort of empty. You know, hey, I I got my my midnight halfp price midnight shake at uh at Sonic.

Uh how many of those can I have? Well, they have effects on the body, you know, and uh and and and uh they don't always uh take us where we want to go. And so, Sor Hugor says we reach a point of despair, of meaninglessness, not one more piece of candy, one more conquest, one more overcoming of boredom is just not going to be enough. We have to find something more. And this is where we are driven says Saurin Kirk Kugord to make a choice to embrace the ethical life that is to go outside of ourselves and the self-interest of the individual and pursue a dutybound life to other people that we're not the center of the universe.

The ethical man this is what he in his book the either or you have to make a choice. Am I going to be for my spouse? Am I going to be for my family? Am I going to be for the state and not just out for myself? And in this leap of faith um toward the ethical man, it's a leap outside of ourselves toward responsibility for someone else. And this is the next stage, he would argue, of human development. This dutybound embrace of something that's more meaningful than just me. You know, if you think about the two great commandments, loving God and loving others, this would be the second one of the loving others.

Learning to love people other than yourself. You may have selflove in the athe but you have um neighbor love if you will in the ethical and uh his person here is not Don Juan we have a different sort of icon here or person uh you know exemplar of the ethical and that was Socrates according to Sorakugore. Socrates is interesting because he is an ethical guy or like he strives to be. He is an he he's he's he's built on principles. He loves the state. He was a senator. He was a warrior. Um he was a man of affairs and he he he would often times risk his own life for the sake of the state.

He was also a married man and he had a family and um he had those duties as well. And famously in the um in uh I guess it would have been in Fedo where they they're describing Socrates's death he asked Credo to pay a debt for him before he dies. His last words are his responsibility to somebody to whom he owned he owed money. And so we have this second stage of development called the ethical. Now the ethical man is a clear civilized rise above the estate.

And I don't think any too many new people would deny that. But for Sor and Kirhigore that too is a horizontal chasing after the wind. Oh, it's greater than the estee no doubt. You've stepped outside of yourself. You're actually responsible for other people. You're you're you have duties to other people. You have commitments to other people. But that can be a chasing after the wind as well. you realize that that is finite and that your meaning is bound up in something that is also finite. So Saur and Kerhugore thinks that you know to a certain extent that form of life that kind of embrace that kind of pursuit that kind of passion runs into a wall eventually a wall questioning its eternity its meaningfulness.

And this is where Kirkagore thinks that we begin to entertain an eternal embrace, a leap of faith towards something that can ground meaning. Not just in the moment as with the aesthet, not just within the space-time continuum as with the ethical man, but something that transcends the space-time continuum, God himself. And it is in this movement towards the religious man that we find ourselves.

You see, prior to that, we're just in a state. We're just in we're just in the sort of flow of the river going along with whatever opportunities present themselves to us. The ethical man stands against the river and is able to resist the pleasures of temptation and other things because it has a higher calling. The family, the state um uh um and so forth, one spouse, those sorts of things. But the religious man is able to make his way upstream to the source because it's only there that you find true meaning. You find an answer to the question, who am I? I am a finite being dependent, contingent, and reliant upon the infinite eternal one that is God.

And it's only God at the end of the day that a can make your life meaningful, thinks Kugore, and B can tell you who you really are. You see, you've been trying to find your way through accidental connections as the estate or fabricated connections as in the ethical. But in the religious man, God is the one who tells you who you who you are and who places demands upon you as he did upon Abraham. Then Abraham is the uh person who is the exemplar of the religious man because Abraham was the one who was asked by God to kill his son Isaac.

And that confounds the ethical man. How could you possibly ask me to kill my son? First of all, that's murder and it's illegal and it's immoral. And secondly, you had promised me a son. And you had promised that I would uh uh you know that the generations would be blessed through me and my progeny. And here you are asking me to kill off that line. And Abraham said, "Well, God has reasons that reason knows nothing of." I mean, he doesn't say that, but that's essentially what's going on. I think wants to suggest. And so, he begins, you know, gathering wood and taking his son up the mountain to the altar where he will kill and sacrifice his son per God's command.

Now, why is that so significant? because it is a demonstration of maturity of the realization that God is God and you are a human being and although you think you're capable of judging God's actions, you cannot judge God's actions. Kier reasons that maybe what's in Abraham's mind as he takes his son up, bounds him on the altar, and raises his knife, is that perhaps God will raise his body up again. Or perhaps God has some other plan. I know not what he's God. I am not. I'm only bound to obedience to him. Well, of course, you know the rest of the story. God stops Abraham and commends his faith for going the distance with him.

This is the leap of faith. This is the letting go, the realization that God's will and not our will is sovereign. And it's there that we find ourselves before the living God. And this is Saurin Kirkugore's sort of trajectory on life's way. Notice that the movement between the stages is a letting go, a leap of faith. Letting go of past passions for the ethical life, the married life, the life of civil obedience, the life of commitment to something other than yourself. Um, notice how the ethical man realizes that even that's a chasing after the wind in the big grand scheme of things and that the only place where you can find a true source of meaning is in God alone and letting go.

You know, as a as a dad, you do have to let go now and then of your family. You can't be a helicopter parent forever. You have to let go and let the let them take risks.

let them go out into the world and you know as soon as they step out the door I think it's Bilbo Baggins once said you know um they might get swept away and you don't know where life's going to take you and uh I think this is Saur and Kirkugor's point is part of maturity is a part of letting go of those things and trusting in God because it's there that you know who you are and it's there that you can make a difference in the lives of other people. So, we have this notion of the leap of faith. Now, you can obviously see where my thinking is going with this, that it's not unlike the kinds of leaps that we see on these reels on face Facebook and so forth.

People want more meaning than they're capable of finding within themselves. They want a story to tell. They want to have uh um they want to do something no one else has ever done before. And so, we're pushing the envelope. um in all of these areas and people find a kind of um h source of meaning there that they can't find anywhere else. And Kigor has another point. Sometimes it's called truth as subjectivity. It's about realizing that, you know, you can watch reals all you want or you can watch other people do things, but sooner or later you have to be involved. It's about passionate commitment and embracing the unknown.

And everybody needs to have on their bucket list a bungee jump or a parachute jump or, you know, people turn 40 or whatever and they jump out of a plane or or something along those lines. This is what Saurin Kirkugore means at least in part when he talks about truth of subjectivity. It's one thing to know that you could do something. It's another thing to actually do it to experience it for yourself. This kind of passionate commitment is where the truth is found. This is where you begin to find yourself. Think Saurin Kerkord is when you let go and you become involved.

It's one of the reasons why, you know, he critiqued the church of his time because it was very lurggical, very much a dutybound thing, something closer to the ethical than to the religious because God's not making demands within that church as it were in his in his time at least that um that stretch us that that let us know that he's God and we're not. Um and so uh we have in this notion of truth as subjectivity, you as the individual must own the truth and go out and live the truth. And I think that that is at least in part. So he has a one last Kirkagardian insight that I think is useful here is a term that uh scholars call indirect communication.

It's one thing for me to, you know, as a teacher to pour into students knowledge, right? But some students are ready to receive what I have to say and other students, you know, it's it's going right over their head. But according to Sor and Kugore, you have to kind of allow them to embibe the truth for themselves when they're ready for it. And so he uses indirect communication. He doesn't tell them what to believe or what to think. He asks questions. He uses a sort of Socratic formula or he makes suggestions and doesn't tell them they should believe one thing or another. But he allows them through his indirect communication to own the truth for themselves. They don't have to believe it because Firestone said it or their teacher said it or their parents said it or anything else.

more importantly is for the subject to own the truth to make that decision to make that leap for themselves and this is why he advocates a kind of indirect communication. So Saurin Kirk is famous for not signing any of his writings. It's called synonymous authorship. Uh and why does he do that? Because he doesn't want people to believe his philosophical insights because they were said by him. They want them, he wants them to read it and own the truth for themselves. And so this is a fascinating element of Saurin Kirkagore's philosophy.

And what it's doing, it's correcting the sort of Hegelian uh uh uh march, you know, which talks about the absolute coming to self-standing through the historical process and through the individual who's caught up in this great cog of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis. It's almost as though we're a passive participant in the ongoing self-actualization of the absolute. For Kagore, it's much more personal, much more individual, much more dependent upon your choices, your decisions, your growth, your maturity, your embrace of the truth, your leap of faith towards a meaningfulness that is greater than just yourself. So, how does this connect?

um with the risks we see in extreme reels, we see it in sports, we see it in life, we see it in a variety of places. How does it hit home for us today? Well, before I directly address that again, I mean, we've made some hints as to why I think people are doing what they're doing with these things and why we're so enraptured by them. Um, let me tell you a story um about one adventure I had in my youth. I guess if I was going to place myself on the Kirkagardian um scale between the estate, the ethical and the religious, I'm probably between the estate and the ethical at this stage of my life.

Now, this is when I was about 21 years old. We had a spring break as students often do in America and uh we were going to go out we're going to rent a car and go out to uh go out to Colorado and Utah from Chicago and that was going to be the spring break. I guess it was from the University of Illinois at that time. So south of Chicago. Um, so we got a car, we made our way out, we got to Utah, and we got to this area near Moab, Utah, where the Colorado River runs through and just an absolutely stunning place to be.

The scenery is unbelievable. They have these red, excuse me, sandstone mountains. I went mountain biking there. That was a glorious experience. learned a lot about myself that in that experience and of course this Colorado River and creates a kind of mini Grand Canyon effect there in Moab or near Moab, Utah. And uh we decided, you know, hey, we're not going to spend any money on any hotel or anything. We're just going to sleep out along the river in the desert there. And um it's just a glorious thing when you when you sleep out there in the desert.

You know, the nighttime is just perfect, but you're down in this canyon and I can remember seeing the stars in the sky outlined by the canyon, dark canyon walls, and you can see this the curve of the river in the canyon there. Just an amazing and amazing thing. Well, of course, we were a little bit bored. Uh, you know, the river's great, the scenery is great, but uh we got to do something fun and athletic and so forth. So, we had this idea that why don't we raft the Colorado River. Now, this is June uh not um not June, but early spring. Um and uh you know, river seems to be fast and so forth, but it sure looks like a lot of fun.

So, we decided we're going to look up a uh the local truck tire company and see if we can get some inner tubes and see if we can raft the Colorado River with it. improvised rav raft. So, we did find a truck area. We bought four large truck inner tubes and we got them all aired up and we had a minivan that and we put them on top the van. We used rope to tie them down. And uh the plan was basically to take those giant inner tubes, tie them together about 10 miles upstream, and then to um ride back down to the camp, get out at the camp, and then hitchhike our way back to the car at our leisure. I mean, that's the basic plan, but it sounds really good in theory.

In fact, I thought it was like a perfect idea. So, we drove up. There's a kind of a road to the uh I don't know what direction. It was on the to my mind as I was heading upstream was on the right hand side. There's canyon walls on the left hand side of the river, but on the right hand side there's this road. We ride it up about 10 miles. We find a parking lot up there and uh we put together our raft. Now, as we were driving up there, um, one of the inner tubes burst. I don't know if it was the heat of the sun or if it was the ropes or what, but boom.

So, we had four of us jumping on this raft. And, um, we only had three inner tubes at this point. Well, these were pretty big inner tubes. We thought, "No problem. They're going to handle us. Let's keep the plan moving forward." So, we tied them together. We threw our beverages over the side in a bag that we a net bag that we had had it hanging in the water and we get into the Cal Rattle River and off we go. Um, just an amazing an amazing I I don't know how long it took, but we were moving, you know, maybe an hour just flying along this river and just majestic the canyon walls, the the the the way the river moved around.

There's these huge swirls. Some of these swirls were the size of like half a football field, it seemed like. And just just huge swirls of water, big boulders. You know, we didn't have a lot of stuff underneath us so far as we could tell, but the big boulders that we would sometimes kind of go whizzing by, they were majestic. Just really uh quite the experience until, of course, we were flying down the river. We real Hold it.

What was that? That was our camp. Our camp went whizzing by. Now, we knew we had to get off this river, but knowing that you have to get off the river and actually getting off the river um are two different things. We had a couple of paddles that makeshift paddles that we put together, but we tried to use these things in the water and they were not getting us where we need to go. Every time we thought we were making headway, the river would push us right back out to the center. Now, a lot of things were going through my mind at the time. You know, what's down this river this way?

We really hadn't scouted past the camp. We didn't think we would go past the camp. I mean, is there any waterfalls? Are there any like rapids that we should be concerned about or what? Didn't know anything about that. So we started saying, you know, let's get ourselves off this river as fast as we possibly can. Well, um, we tried and we tried and we tried and we tried. We could not get back to the proper side, the roadside of the river, but we were able, by some strange twist of fate here, able to get us onto the right side of the river.

Now, this is the canyon wall side, you know, where it's, I don't know, 200 f feet up the canyon wall. There's no way nowhere to go over there, but at least we're safely off the river. Um, that's when we're kind of looking at each other. What What are we going to do? How are we going to get across the Colorado River and back to safety, you know, and and and and make our way back to the camp and make our way back to our car? Well, as we were thinking this through, um, two of my friends, I put friends in scare quotes because after I tell you this story, you're going to like, huh?

They jumped into our um into our uh uh inner tubes that we had tied together, and instead of sitting on them and paddling, they put their arms over the side and they kick together across the river. Now I'm looking downstream and I can see them. It seemed to me like a mile down. I don't know how, you know, the actual distance, but I could see them make it to the other side with the inner tubes. And my first thought was, "Good for them. They're safe. They're over there. All's good. Now, what do me and my buddy here finess what is what are we going to do?"

Well, that's when, you know, I'm thinking to myself, okay, it's the afternoon, late afternoon. How long can we go on here? I mean, we have to spend the night out here, hope for a rescue. How are we going to get across the Colorado River? Well, I look across the river right where I was standing there, and it seemed to me to be not that far. Um, I'm a young guy, consider myself a pretty good athlete. Um, I'm a really good swimmer. Why don't I just swim across? And so that's what I got into my head. Why not just swim across? Well, um, um, we're looking around.

We're walking up and down. I don't know what Finus is thinking, but I'm thinking, "Hey, man. I think we ought to give this thing a swim. I think we can make it. Now, before I jumped in the water, I thought thought I'd do a test. I pick up a a small rock and I throw it as far as I possibly can and I know I can throw like 50 60 yards or whatever and it falls short. I don't know by 30 yards or whatever. I figure it's no, it can't be more than 100 yards across this river. Now, I can swim 100 yards in my sleep.

So, I think I'm just going to go for it. So, without further ado, this impetuous 21-year-old jumps into the water. Um, t-shirt, shorts, and and uh and uh some um what were those things? Uh moccasins basically uh on my feet. I get about I don't know 20 yards out in the water and realize, dang, this thing is fast, deep, cold, all of those things. So, I immediately realize I'm not going to survive this if I don't kick my shoes off. So, I kicked my shoes off and uh that helps. I can actually swim now.

And uh first thing I do once I kick those off is I yell to my buddy Finest, "Hey man, don't swim, man. It's too fast out here." So, I'm basically yelling back to him. Maybe this is my first ethical moment in this shift from the astite to the ethical. yelling back to my buddy finest not to go in the water, not to try to swim. I figured I was a better swimmer than him, but you know, I'm sure he'd dispute that. Um anyway, uh now I'm in the middle of the river and flying down.

My problems are only just starting though because here I am trying to kick and swim across the river, realizing I'm starting to get a little bit tired, you know, and this river's fast and I'm looking, you know, every once in a while you got to rest and realizing, okay, I'm still in the middle of the river. I thought I was swimming across, but every time I swam, it seemed like the river was so fast, it just straightened me out and I'm swimming right downstream. And I know I don't want to swim downstream because I don't know what's down there. Um anyway, I start uh realizing that, you know, my strength is going down and my progress is not going up and I'm in trouble. I'm cold.

I'm getting tired and if something doesn't change, I'm not going to make it to the other side. And this is when I come to this realization, this river and this water is a lot bigger, faster, stronger than I am. And I'm out of control. And I've got um a finite amount of time to try to figure this out. It was at that moment where I just started saying three words over and over again. I think by the time, you know, I get out of the water, I'd probably said it 100, 200 times. It was just, "Lord, help me. Lord, help me. Lord, help me.

Over and over and over again, I said it as I realized um in this big bad world that I put myself into, I don't have the strength to get to the other side. And uh I was desperate. Honestly, I it was it was kind of where I was at my wit's end that an insight hit me. And to this day, I don't know if this is good advice or if it was just fortuitous thinking that led to a fortuitous outcome. I don't really know. But I had this insight that because every time I started swimming to the other side, the river would straighten me out and just send me downstream that I would swim upstream at a 45 degree angle and when the river straightened me out, I'd be roughly going straight across.

So it was with that insight that I said, I'm I I have one chance here. I'm going to swim at this 45 degree angle. what I perceive a 45 degree angle to be in this winding river. And I am going to give it everything I've got to see if I can make it to the other side. So I did that. I went for I swam. I did, you know, I used all those little tricks you learn when you're when you're learning swimming. you know, keep your head down, breathe to the side, breathe to the side, kick, go 45° angle upstream, reassess, where am I? And lo and behold, I was much closer to the other side.

In fact, I saw my other my one of the two people who had already made it across and his name was Jeffrey. Jeffrey was running along the river kind of with me as I was swimming. And uh he had this long branch and he was slapping it in the water trying to reach it so I could get there cuz every time he sort of stepped into the water he would go under because there wasn't any real bank. So he was there running up the river with this long branch trying to uh to you know give me some sort of safety uh handhold there. Anyway, somehow I managed to get within range for him to jump in, grab my uh grab my shirt or collar or whatever it was and pull me to the shore.

And uh I was utterly spent at that time. I had nothing left. I mean, to show you how tired I was, he had laid me against the bank and then he was going kind of walking back up the side of the bank and I'm in the water and the water started pulling me out and I couldn't hold myself on the bank there and and Jeffrey had to run back down there and pull me further up onto the beach. Anyway, um, from a storytelling perspective, it's kind of cool because who do you know that has that that's has uh managed to swim across the Colorado River in uh in the spring um on their own without any float flotation devices.

Uh, that's a pretty cool story to tell. Another another uh side of it though is I nearly lost my life and I was totally taken to my wits end. I was exhausted. I ended up sitting under a tree kind of up the bank a bit cuz here we are in the desert. It was definitely over 100° and my two friends um made their way uh back. I think they hitchhiked back to camp or to the car. I can't remember which one. I ultimately had to go get the car. And I stayed there underneath the tree. Couldn't even move.

And I was just looking upstream and wondering how is my buddy Finus ever going to make it across the river. I certainly hope he doesn't jump in like I did. And uh that's when um you know, a shocking to me at the time. most totally shocking event happened. I saw for the first time all day a kind of small blue tugboat way upstream and uh was making its way downstream and uh it went to the opposite side of the river and I thought I saw my buddy get on it and then the boat made its way down to where I was sitting, pulled up to the side and then my buddy Finus got off and walked up to where I was.

I was totally flabbergasted at that point. I just risked my life swimming across the river and a tugboat saved him. I don't know what the moral of the story is in that one, but what I did learn about myself is that these risks and this total um futility on my part and being able to get across the river um woke me up and my faith got me through. And in this time of desperation, you it's like you've heard this saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. Well, there are no aesthets in in rivers. I mean, maybe that's the theme that I learned. There are no pure pleasure seekers when they're about to die. They just cry out and uh say, "Lord, help me." And I learned that about myself and it helped me to grow.

um my desperation sharpened everything. So I think at least in part what people are doing when they're risktaking is they are trying to overcome boredom. They're trying to find something about themselves, their true subjectivity. They're trying to be in the moment. But in that letting go, we can sometimes find ourselves in a position of desperation. And that one way of thinking about what happened to me was I was making this transition from the aesthetical. But I had to even leapfrog the ethical to go to the religious in order to survive the attempt that I had made to overcome boredom out there in the Utah desert.

Desperation like that strips away the noise. There's a quote from Edgar Allan Poe that I used in in in u in the opening sequence of one of of a movie that I made. Yeah, I'll have to tell the story of the movie that I made. I made several different movies over the years, but this one was a feature film called Killing Poe. But uh this this little saying of Edgar Allen Poe is so crisp, so on point that I thought I'd share it with you. It's he says, "He who only has a moment to live no longer has anything to hide."

And that struck a chord with me when I first read it. And it and I related to that moment that I'm out on the river thinking that I might not make it. Um, I no longer had all these layers and layers of hiding from God, covering me. All I had was God at that point. Lord, help me. Lord, help me. It cemented my trust in God's power over life and death and it has put me on a trajectory. I'm not a perfect guy by any means. I get myself in trouble and I do stupid stuff and you know but in that journey I come often come to a point where my own plans lead to futility.

desperation and my only posture is a posture of submission before the living God. And I think that that is one of the key takeaways for me that in these journeys, these stretching events where we stretch ourselves, we learn what really matters in life. And at the end of the day, a meaningful life, if it's truly meaningful, is going to be meaningful because it's rooted in God. God's will over life and death, God's uh kingdom ends, if you will. So, what risks have shaped you? What stories do you have of stepping out?

You know, I think I think a lot of what's happening on these reels and so forth are people who are dabbling with risktaking in controlled environments um without needing to go the full distance of commitment to others or even to God. But it's something in the human condition that we know that we need. We need to wake up.

We need to realize that we're finite, that we're not capable of living this life on our own. We need other people. And we need God, and we need to know who we are in the in the presence of God so that we know what we're supposed to do in our lives. and what kinds of things have eternal rai ramifications and what kinds of things are just mundane and you know worthless at the end of the day. So I'm curious what have you learned from your risk takingaking? Maybe you maybe you're the one of those people who would really don't take risks. Um I suspect if you don't take any risks, you never really fully learn um reliance on God.

But if you take too many risks or in a sense risk too much kind of unwisely that that can end badly. And so part of the u the um sort of u skill of life is to find ways in which you can go out, stretch yourself, journey, do things, take some risks, but do so knowing that they are inherently at the end of the day dependent upon the one who created you and using the gifts and wisdom and everything else and and and abandoning together with other people um then that's the best way to grow and that's the best way to understand who you are and what your place is in the world. All right. Well, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening and uh look forward to bringing uh another interesting question uh to bear here in the Firestone Files. Have a good one.

Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.

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