I just failed a business and everything is on credit cards. Yes, I’ll take a paycheck for a little while to get out of debt. And yes, if I didn’t leave my career to learn and start business ventures, I would have an extra quarter million in my bank.

Despite my explicit mistakes, I wouldn’t change anything because I am so much more afraid of normalcy. Ambition might have been dampened in my heart but it’s still in my bones. I can’t shake it.

There must be a reason the love of adventure, science, and risk has hasn’t been removed from our gene pool. Yes, the majority of people are agreeable and content to man their tasks. However, for every ten tribes that tried something new - braved ocean currents - to see how much better life could be on the other side, one of them would make it. They would be the foundation of the New World. A Galileo, a Columbus, a Magellan! They would be enshrined in a Greatness that, unfortunately, their lives never saw. Why? Because if it wasn’t their ambition that killed them, it was the social disruption of an unnerved civilization resistant to change.

I can see the paths before me conflict with each other. I could ‘easily’ have kids and provide a stable, prosperous life for them but I only know how to see God when I follow my nature and push myself to fear how big of a task I can manage before me. Whether it’s the rattling of my systems at the nexus of failure across my musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, intellectual, and fibrous mechanisms or the convergence of singular focus on a terrifying realization… I crave it. My fear response must be misaligned. Honestly, it’s not hard to rationalize that it has been to my detriment.

I will handle myself but I will implore you to live fully and continue to develop both the foresight to keep your life circumstances coherent to your vision, and the wherewithal to change your situation for the better. So hold onto it: we are the dancers.

• Written in a Wafflehouse in southeast Virginia