The below video appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish“- another of Alan Watts’ transformative lectures set to pictures.  It’s worth your two minutes watching it.

Watts begins by posing this question to his students:  “What if money was no object?”

Sullivan, quoting Chris Higgins, writes: “A central realization, which Watts alludes to here, is that many of us are living our own worst-case scenarios. If you were to take a leap of faith and do the thing you love (in my case, writing), and you were to fail dramatically at it and not have any money, what is the worst that would happen then? You’d probably go back to having a day job, at least for a while. So why would you remain at that day job now, proactively living out your own worst-case scenario?”

Could it be that if what we desire is, at heart, a vocational question, most of us are living out our own worst-case scenarios?  Will most of us forever avoid doing the things we most want to do in this life, because we are afraid to take a leap of faith?  I suppose some of the same fear that keeps us from pursuing our deepest desires also keeps us from doing the things Jesus tells us to do, like forgiving others in bold, generous ways, or giving our possessions away to those in need.