Why Do I Only Ever Join the Adventure, Never Start One?

There was a man in my village famous for being the best company on any trip. Ask him to the river, he brought jokes. Ask him to the mountain, he carried the extra water and made the climb shorter with his talk. One year his neighbor said, 'Nasreddin, when do you take US somewhere?' He thought about it for three days. On the fourth day he announced a trip to the moon. Everyone laughed. Nobody packed a bag. Neither did he. 'I proposed it,' he said. 'Someone else must decide it is real.' This is the trick good companions play on themselves. You think initiating means having an idea so good it survives on its own — so you either wait for that idea, or you propose something so grand it was never meant to happen, and then you get to feel like you tried without risking the plain, small, ordinary yes-or-no of a real invitation. Your group already knows you as the one who shows up. That is not nothing. But somewhere in your pod there's a person waiting to be asked, the way you're always waiting to be asked — and nobody's proposing the boring trip that would actually happen.