Risky hobby requires accepting our mortality

comfortable yet with the idea of death, then I suggest you work on it.”

There is no permanence. If collecting kitten posters were your boyfriend’s hobby, then the odds would tilt more toward his achieving old age, and — this is the real thing, I believe — you’d be better able to trick yourself into a sense of certainty. Sun will rise, summer will come, boyfriend will return from a run to buy milk.

But loving someone is a guarantee of heartbreak. Well, there is one loophole: when you die first. So if you’re building your happy on a belief that it’s possible for no bad things to happen, and if your happy can be derailed by having to stand closer to reality than your heart and imagination want you to, then please spend less time trying to rein in your boyfriend and more on your emotional resilience.

It’s hard. The only way many of us can face the idea of loss is through inevitability — when a loved one’s illness, injury or death forces us to.

But it needn’t be that way. Our minds are powerful things, and when we stop telling them life will be good when everything lines up just right, and tell them instead that life is good when we enjoy what we have while we have it, our minds start to believe it.

One mantra to retrain your mind toward strength: “I can’t stop this, change this, prevent this. I can only manage it when it happens.” Look around, too. The human spirit has withstood war, famine, genocide, etc. It has withstood bikers, too — who make it home, and who don’t.

Loving a risk-seeker offers two choices: Embrace the risk or torture you both by fighting it. For a mind that resists retraining, consider getting screened for anxiety; sometimes choices do only so much.