Tonight, I'll give a talk at the Red Dragon Canoe Club, our local boat club. I've called the talk: Cruising the Coast of Maine: The Fun and the Fear. I've assembled a Powerpoint slide show, and I'll ad lib for about 90 minutes.  I find that when you know a subject, it isn't all that difficult to wing it, as long as you have a general outline of what you want to say.
In this case, since Monica and I have made several trips to Maine aboard Robin, there is a lot to talk about as long as I stick to describing what we've seen and how we've gone about plotting and executing a cruise.
What I have to avoid is finding myself in a place where I believe I have some expertise -- that I actually know something. As soon as you think you are an authority, I've found, you're on the precipice of a great and painful fall.
So I need to enter the talk with a robust sense of my own ignorance and with a few stories to tell that demonstrate my fallibility. A few out of many, many. All the near-misses, and some of that calamitous collisions that were not avoided.