Meandering whims of a curious mind

A friend of mine blogged an awfully interesting title the other day, "A  life lived in resigned desperation is a life not lived."  In his usual comic tendencies, he put forth a point traversed so many times by so many people …

If you want a life less ordinary, live it. Throw caution to the wind and take your chances. Breathe the air as it was supposed to be experienced. Embrace life.

All very disconnected quips, but stating the same. If you want something in life, go get it. Don’t let failure or worse the fear of failure stop you from pursuing your goals.

If you are like me, oftentimes we never know what we want out of life, which direction to take. So we wait … and wait … and wait, hoping it’d suddenly hit us like a brick wall and we’d find out our purpose in life.

We placate our fears with the fact that we will strike when the iron is hot. And that when we do, we’d charge mercilessly towards our goals … we’d be huge success. we dream of the riches and accolades raining down. Yes, we’d be able to do it.

That is, of course, until we’ve discovered our passion. In the meantime, we just have to wait. No problem. Let’s wait.

There’s a fine line between waiting and procrastination and fear. I did it for the longest time … until I decided to change. Why?

A friend of mine, a meticulous, hardworking person and extremely intelligent … had a pretty nice, stable job … very well-liked and was easily primed for higher positions. Career-wise … it seemed quite a good pace to strive at … moving into greater heights safely … secured in the thought that there was great support from the superiors, receiving compliments after compliments …

But it wasn’t enough. As an extremely organized person, so prone to pre-planning and and astute risk management, my friend decided to take the plunge. Leaving an industry so intertwined career-wise with all that was comforting and familiar, it was a huge torment of uncertainty to persevere into the complete unknown. I was going like "Wow" - … even I felt fearful … so worried

And yet, no matter which way I looked at it, all I could see was courage. Courage to step out of the comfort zone and risk it. But it was a passion to self-actualize, to be all that you can be that drove the move … and with that, it invoked an overwhelming amount of respect.

I mean, we have but one life, lets just live it the way we want it to be. Sure, sometimes we don’t know what to risk for … but just take the first bus that piques your interest and ride it out.

And so on my part, I started to pick up an awfully thick book and went back to school. I have no idea how I’m gonna read this damn book or when I’m gonna finish it. But I will and I will not stop there.  It will go on until I find another better bus to ride in.

This takes a far lesser courage than what my blogger friend suggests and surely a lot less risk then what my career-changing friend is doing .. but hey … it’s a start.

So take life by the horns and live it. Take responsibility of your own life and go work for what you want cos if you want to be happy … you’ve got to pursue it.

PS: Even got my boss to change his entire management style after 5 long years .. How? By drafting out new (very risky) proposals and presenting them (after organizing my peers to back up the plan, of course) .. its still going to be  lot of work … but it’s a lot brighter. So get off your ass!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 5:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.