What if? It’s a question that I have been thinking about a lot since our big win.

What if no one volunteers to help?

What if I collapse of exhaustion? Check back in September for the answer to this one.

But it’s one that I have been asked by people when first faced with a project that essentially asks statutory services to hand over responsibility for areas of land to a volunteer community group. What if you get bored? What if you can’t keep up with the work and it all gets neglected?

I started to think about these ‘what ifs’. They all were coming from one direction, one viewpoint – that of failure or a ‘glass half empty’ position.

Now anyone who knows me, knows that I am a ‘glass half full’ type of gal – so I’ve started to counteract these negative ‘what ifs’.

What if we do nothing? What if we leave the grubby looking roller shutters? What if we leave the weed filled, neglected grass verges and tree pits? Well, we know what will happen with these ‘what ifs’: nothing changes. Gorse Hill remains ungorgeous, potential is left unfulfilled, great ideas get left on the drawing board. We know the answer to these ‘what ifs’.

The other ‘what ifs’ I’m asked presume something, don’t they? They presume we’ll give up, they presume we need looking after and we don’t know our own minds. They want safety, they want the status quo to stay – they are caution over risk. But we know where caution leads – it leads to nothing changing.

So I say let’s take a risk. We might fail, we might get bored, but if we don’t try we won’t know – we won’t know if everyone will be inspired and start to grow, flourish, get involved, plant and decorate.

So I say if we want to stay the same and wait for someone else to take care of it all, we can… or, we can take a risk and get people to join us, to flourish, spread colour, spread life and inspire.

We might crash and burn, but what if?

What if we don’t?