Safety first? You decide...

While half the world's population is still ordered to 'stay home and save lives' the above is a gentle reminder of what life is really supposed to be about, courtesy of motocross stunt legend Robbie Maddison.

I'm not about to suggest anyone has to go out and jump over a canyon on a motorbike to feel alive, but the Australian's point is that there is no such thing as total 'safety'. We are ALL going to die. Indeed, simply by being born we sign our own death sentence. That applies whether we spend our lives BASE jumping or watching TV on the couch.

Twenty years ago the seven-time Formula 1 world champion Michael Schumacher summed this up to me in similar terms: ‘We all know there is danger involved in motor racing. Unfortunately we will never find total security, not only in F1 but life as a whole. That’s pretty much a disaster for all of us but we all have to live with this somehow.’

Schumacher's amiable irony was clear: we live our entire lives facing daily dangers, everything from getting on a plane to crossing the street to, yes, getting ill. That's life, and we accept the risks because overall it's worth it. If we were to imagine everything that could go wrong in an average day we would never leave the safety of our beds.

Ridiculous? You bet. Yet that's effectively what half the world is being forced to do right now in accordance with yet another external threat. Keep calm and carry on? Not this time. Now we have to panic and stop everything.

All in the name of 'safety'.

Hmmm... or are we missing the whole point?

Of course we all like to feel safe, particularly at a time of so much trauma in everything we read and watch. But no matter how warm and cosy our bed might feel, without access to ALL the information who's to know whether or not that bed is really located in a block of flats that's on fire, or a ship that's sinking? This is why the urge for safety should never trump an even more primary human need: freedom.

If we give up our freedom - hard won for us by earlier generations, many of whom paid with their own lives - for some misplaced idea of temporary 'safety' we will, as Benjamin Franklin famously said, deserve neither. Instead we are merely guaranteeing that not only will we die, we won't even have the chance to live first.

For further details please check out my blog below on fear and dreams. In the meantime, you might be interested in this article from the new official F1 magazine, now also published on the F1 website. I only wrote it a couple of months ago, but it already feels like something from another planet...