The safe choice isn’t always safe. Sometimes it’s just slow danger.

Risk is easy to spot when it arrives all at once and almost invisible when it arrives by the week. The class you have outgrown, the job that goes nowhere, the friendship that makes you smaller: none of it looks like a gamble, because nothing bad happens today. The cost shows up as years instead of bruises. It is still a cost.

Look at one thing you are keeping mainly because changing it feels risky. Ask where it leaves you in three years if nothing moves. If that picture is worse than the scary version, you have your answer, and the first step can be small.