The world can be a pretty confusing place. Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of what you really desire. There are always other influences, people’s expectations, social stigmas, peer pressures and a whole host of powerful forces pushing you one way or another. How can you maintain or even know the path you want to take amidst all the noise?
The other problem is, it’s hardly even noticeable. One minute you’re playing cricket in the backyard with your friends, the next you’re stuck in a job you hate with a baby on the way. Well, maybe not that fast, but something along those lines. Things happen, and we make decisions along the way that we didn’t realize were that important, that wind up shaping our future. The words of our friends, our parents, some dude on TV, lead us astray from the dreams we had when we were young.
But all is not lost. For within us all there is still that child that we used to be, looking out with eyes of wonder at the world. It may be buried under a mountain of adult problems, but you can rest assured that if you search hard enough, you’ll find a familiar face in there. It’s never too late to discover your inner child, the child of the past who knew what they wanted out of life.
The problem with life is that people grow up. The older you get, the more you think you know and the more you think you know the more you start to believe that you’re smart. Older people categorize everything, whether they’ve seen it before or not, whether they’ve experienced it or not. They categorize and judge things based on their years of experience and think that there’s nothing new to know. It gives us confidence, but takes away our curiosity, it makes us sound smart at the cost of losing the wonder we had when we looked at the world as a mysterious place. I challenge you that most of the things you think you know, you don’t really know at all. You just think you know and you never bothered to check if you were right or not. Go on, check. I’ll wait.
No actually I won’t, because I had a more important point. If you forgo the idea that you do know everything, it may just be possible to learn something new or head your life in a different direction. Some people like to imagine that they are living their last day and wonder what they would do. I don’t suggest this, unless you plan to do a bunch of crazy things with little prospect of any future. I suggest that if you’re struggling to find perspective as the winds of influence buffer you about, do the opposite and imagine that you will live forever. Now, imagining that your body would stay young for another half a millenia or so, ask yourself, what would you do first?
If you worry that it’s too late to change what you’re doing, that there’s not enough time to do that traveling you always wanted to do or to learn how to play the guitar or to join a local club, think again. Worrying about time is a fools past time because worrying only stalls us further. By the time we realize we’re stalling, a whole bunch of time has passed, which makes you worry about it more. What we all have to realize is that life is like Wheel of Fortune (I know, profound isn’t it?). We have no idea what fortune we’ll have, but the game has a definite end and unless you spend your money in the gift shop, you may well come away with nothing. But in life, it’s not money but time that will run out at the end of the game. You can’t take any of it with you, so what good is it wasting all your time to do something that doesn’t make you happy? Are there really greater factors at work in life than people being happy living?
“I do it for my children” the struggling fathers of the world say. “I slave away at this job to send them to college so they won’t have to work as hard.” Which is an honorable thing to do. But will they be happy after all that? Or will they do the exact same thing as you and then tell me that they’re doing it for their kids.
But don’t think about it from a purely selfish perspective. It’s in the interests of humanity that you do find the thing you love. Happy people don’t start wars easily. They work harder out of sheer joy and make advances in their fields to the benefit of the rest of us. You owe it to humanity to stop putting up with that crap you call a life and start living your dreams fella! Too harsh?
Look inside. Go on. Ask your inner child what they make of your life. Find out what mattered to you then, what dreams you had when you still had the ability to dream. Picture your life stretching out into eternity and go for the first thing that takes your fancy. You may well discover a part of yourself that you had forgotten existed.
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