We wear many masks and fluff ourselves up with many props, but how’s that working for us? Nikki Giovanni notices:

A lot of people refuse to do things because they don’t want to go naked, don’t want to go without a guarantee. But that’s what’s got to happen. You go naked until you die.

What guarantees do we have in this life anyway? To health, to wealth, to job security, to happiness? Not so much. There really aren’t any guarantees to anything we do, and we delude ourselves to think otherwise. When we ‘go naked’ we engage from a place of authenticity, without the masks and props. We, our actual selves, enter into this thing called life.

J.K. Rowling notes:

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all– in which case, you fail by default.

This is it, our one shot, our one life, and we owe it to ourselves to go into it as ourselves and with gusto.