Understanding The Difference Between RISKS and DANGERS in Climbing and Life

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If you saw my video in our Mental Health Awareness Month Series that introduced a bit more personal details about me and got into our YouTube Channel’s origin (as well as this accompanying blog), then you know that the combination of my immune-system (white blood cells) cancer and the COVID pandemic, made 2020 and the accompanying years very risky for me - and therefore for my family. People with my version of cancer were dying at a 38% rate if they got severe COVID.

Everything my family and I did was through the lenses of risk assessment and risk management. That’s not to say that I am an expert in those fields, but I am both more practiced and more familiar with the core tenants than many people: I had spent an adult life voluntarily going to risky places to climb and I grew up around a risk professional. As I state in the video, my dad made a living out of assessing risks and developing mitigating strategies for the United States’ myriad nuclear facilities. He and his cohort deployed and got Congress to act upon recommendations stemming from empirical and mathematically driven analyses called “probabilistic risk assessment.”

I learned how a web of data analyses could be collated and consolidated to help bring some objectivity to what is an inherently emotionally-triggering activity: thinking about really bad things happening.

Like anything dealing with such interconnected complexities (inter-dependent mechanical systems along with human behaviors), it would be a stretch to say that the math of these assessments proved accurate to the point that there was no longer any guess-work in determining risks. But it would be equally misguiding to suggest that the math couldn’t provide reliable ranges of risks.

My father had worked in that field of research and policy making for nearly four decades, and I was around for over three decades of that career. Through questions and conversations, and even, eventually, joint work as we brought the methodologies he helped pioneer to my world of health care analytics looking at care and coverage risks, I have had my view of risks significantly colored by that kind of background.

When COVID hit, I was pulling from that background, and my acquired perspective, on a daily basis -sometimes, early on, on a moment-by-moment basis. Should we go to the restaurant? Should we allow the contractor to come over or delay the work on the house? And while I can never know for sure, these lessons from life and from the mountains, which I applied to my daily risk during the pandemic, may have saved my life.

Being able to pull from these lessons certainly saved my mental health. It’s not that I didn’t strain, mentally, but I didn’t break. I was able to pull on something more grounded than intuition which helped me push back on fear with fact. Sure, I still had to deal with probabilities, and the “math” was only loose and in my head, but I had a way to compare risks against one another and develop informed thresholds for my own tolerances of certain kinds of risks.

And while the pandemic may be over for most people, daily risks will forever remain: car rides and financial investments, and job changes, and and and.

So, I hope this video helps any of you the way the framework has helped me.