We do not choose our fragility. It is there before we are aware of it—in our bruises, in our heartache, in the people and pacts that threw us under the bus. Life is a threshold. At every turn we discover how precarious we are, how provisional the sense of assurance has always been.
And yet we live as if security were possible. Every morning we wager again: on love, on friendship, on art, on work, on our bodies. The bet is never guaranteed, but it is all we have. To be human is to trust, and to trust is always to risk collapse.
Table Manners
Margaret Visser, the Toronto-based writer and historian, reminds us in The Rituals of Dinner that eating together is one of the most sacred and dangerous acts humans share. To sit at a table is to expose oneself: hands are occupied, mouth is full, throat unguarded. A knife at the table can feed or kill. The customs we call “manners” were not born of politeness but survival—signals that what could be violent will remain peaceful.
We learn that the word companion comes from the Latin com panis, “with bread.” To share bread is to suspend hostility, to place one’s life in another’s hands, however briefly. Often, when I sit across from someone over a kitchen table, in a crowded café, I remember that treaty: beneath the ease of conversation lies this ancient agreement. To eat together is to gamble that the silence will not become cruelty.
In Spain, and throughout much of the Latin world, there is a word for what happens once this fragile wager holds: sobremesa. It is the lingering after a meal, when the plates are cleared but conversation deepens. It is the cultural memory that trust at the table is about what follows when survival is secured.
What is striking is how little English offers in return. We have phrases like “lingering at the table” or “after-dinner talk,” but no single word to capture the practice as ritual, as value. The absence is telling. Where English privileges efficiency—eat, clear, move on—Latin cultures preserve the pause as sacred. Or perhaps the variation is more akin to UK-style pub culture, rooted in a different forum entirely.
To stay in sobremesa is to risk exposure of the self. Stories are shared, confessions surface, laughter and argument weave into something binding. It is vulnerability ritualised, a decision to remain in each other’s presence after the necessity of eating is complete.
Vulnerability and the Edge
In the early 2010s, the research professor Brené Brown became a household name almost by accident. Her TEDx talk in Houston spoke plainly about something most people prefer to hide: vulnerability. Her message was disarming in its simplicity—vulnerability is not weakness, but the birthplace of connection.
She is right, and her resonance came from naming what we already knew. Vulnerability is not optional. It is fragility in motion. The condition is this: we can be hurt, betrayed, abandoned.
From this vantage, trust is a necessary foundation of the human condition—not an ornament of life. Without trust, no companionship, no community, no culture would exist. And trust is always a careful bet that the other will not betray, that the silence will not break into violence, that what we reveal will not be turned against us.
Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, once observed that “life is always on the edge of death.” To live is to hover near collapse. Our bodies are mortal and fallible, the world indifferent. Maturity arrives when we face this.
The awareness that every embrace could be the last, that every risk of trust could fail, makes each gesture more luminous. A meal shared, a hand held, a word spoken in vulnerability—these moments matter precisely because they are not guaranteed.
The mistake is to imagine security as the aim of life. Security is impossible. What we have instead is a fragile wager, placed again and again, on the very edge of the present.
Nothing Personal
Human fragility is not only personal; it is institutionalised. Entire industries are built on it: insurance selling security, credit promising stability, advertising manufacturing desire, social media feeding on recognition. The pact is simple: surrender a measure of freedom, and the system will soothe your fear of fragility—for a monthly fee. And yet nothing is truly guaranteed.
Neuroscience reminds us that uncertainty is what the brain is designed to navigate. Predictive processing, constant error-correction, the restless calibration of expectation—our nervous system survives by living with risk, not minimising it. To outsource fragility to systems that exploit it is to blunt the very circuitry that keeps us alive.
The counter is a quieter agency: to listen inward, to trust intuition, to accept uncertainty as the ground rather than the exception. Self-reliance here is not isolation but clarity.
In the end, the fragile wager is ours alone to place. To accept it, to extend trust, to risk vulnerability—not because the odds are good, but because risk is what makes life vibrant. Fragility is not our failing; it is our gift. It sharpens each gesture, dignifies each connection, and reminds us why we wager at all.