Here is an example about this: let’s say that a 25 years old male lives together with his parents in their house. The parents cannot stand the presence of their son anymore in their house so they keep pushing him to act in their place by telling him that he needs to have a job, to be independent and to have a house of his own. The son says that he has all the time in the world. He also tells to his parents that if they want him out of the house, they should say so. He would want for them to have the guts to kick him out.
In this case, the parents want the son out, but they don’t have the guts to say that directly. In the same time, the son wants to leave, but he doesn’t have the guts to do it. The wish is the same, but none of them wants to take responsibility for it. The parents want their son to fix their problem and the son wants for the parents to fix his problem.
I think that there are many times in life when we just want things to happen to us because we don’t have enough balls to go for it. In this process, we’re losing time and energy while thinking about how life would be if… Actually, we’re losing parts of our life thinking about life instead of living it because we’re too afraid to do it.
That’s because we’re afraid of the outcome. What if things would go wrong and everybody would make fun of us? What if we’re going to lose all our money with that business idea? What if our crush would refuse to go out with us?
Whenever I encounter this fear (and it’s very often) I imagine about myself young, at 80 years old, looking back at my life. What would I want to see? I want to see a life full with experiences or I want to see a life full with “what if”-s? And the biggest one would be: What if I lived?
So whenever it’s something I can do, I’m going for it (not without overthinking it a little bit, obviously). I’m not waiting for people around me to take action in my behalf because it’s not going to happen. And I’m not waiting for life to happen to me. I’m making it happen.
Yes, I know it’s harder to do and it’s easier to say. I’ve lost 3000 Euros in one year on a failed business idea (I know it doesn’t seem a lot, but it was my whole salary for that year) and almost everybody around me “knew” that it would fail from the beginning. I was laughed at in high school because I wrote something for my crush and I’ve sent it to her (it was obviously a fail). But I regret nothing. I’ve learned from those experiences. I have nice and funny memories now and I can share them with you. If I didn’t have them, I had nothing to share.
If our heart beats are like this -/\-/\-/\-/\-/\-/ it means we’re alive, but if there are like this —- you know what it means. Life has ups and downs… if it’s linear, it’s not a life.