I'm interviewing women for my upcoming book on international business travel for women, and learning a lot about fear. Many women don't travel because they're worried about things that could happen. Well, things will happen, whether at home or abroad, both good and bad.
Rinku Sood, a retail specialist, related a story about how she set off alarm bells in an airport in China with a bag she was carrying for her boss, Mr. Sharma. Raising the level of anxiety, Rinku was traveling with a pregnant colleague who was suffering from stomach distress.
Apparently Mr. Sharma is a vegetarian and he carries food and utensils with him when he travels, and the bag he had asked Rinku to carry happened to have a knife in it.
Between recent terrorist activities and difficulties with the language barrier, our friend Rinku could have ended up in a Chinese prison - she said she was having unpleasant scenes from old movies running through her head while the police were called.
Eventually, cooler heads prevailed, the situation was explained and Rinku was able to catch her flight with her sick friend.
The other story also involves a knife - in this case, a teenager at a high school had helped a friend move over the weekend, and in the untidy mess of kitchen stuff a knife had fallen to the floor of the car, and remained there unnoticed, until . . .
The boy drove his car to school as usual on Monday and parked it in the school parking lot. Later that day, a security guard at the school was walking around the parking lot and happened to see the shiny knife sitting on the floor of the car. (Recently publicized events of violence in schools apparently came to his mind.) Since the school had a no-tolerance policy for weapons, the boy was EXPELLED from SCHOOL while an investigation ensued.
School officials interviewed the kid's friends, parents and teachers to ensure that he wasn't depressed, suicidal or crazy, and eventually he was allowed to return to school.
The point (bad pun) of both of these stories? We live in a society where most fear is misplaced and causes much ado about nothing. If we live among other people, we have to live with the fact that they have the potential to do us harm, with or without a knife. We just need to recognize that the probability of that that potential usually amounts to nothing.
We can't eliminate all risk, just be rational about it. The probability of staying home and dying from heart disease (due to stress, overwork and inactivity) is much greater than the probability of death or injury from anything that could happen while traveling internationally.
But for some reason, our fears are all in the wrong place.
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I remember an incident similar to that of Rinku's, which happened with my mother while she traveled within the country. My mother has a habit of carrying a key-chain that has a pen-knife. I cannot forget the number of heads that turned towards us when the alarm rang during our security check. She never got back her favorite key-chain but was allowed to travel by the scheduled flight :-)
I shared this personal incident to highlight that risks prevail at your own homeland and so it is really not a good thought to avoid trips to a foreign land in fear of unforseen risks. Life rocks if challenges are there to face. :-)
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