Taking risks is never easy.
We have been fed the truth that to happily move through life you do a few things:
- Get a post-secondary education
- Learn transferable skills
- Be a part of as many extracurriculars as humanly possible
- Network even if you do not like it
- Buy a house but do not be daft enough to pay maintenance fees
- Do not have just one child, have two, else face the consequences
- Work as hard as inhumanly possible, most humans cannot work hard enough to achieve happiness through their work
We are told to be fairly risk averse, choose something stable and if you desire a volatile life then live it in the background of stability. This can be sound advice. It can also box us in, force us to believe that the only life worth living is one lived to these standards.
People break out of this box constantly, finding new ways to live and thrive. But for every person that finds their own path, there is a person that is too afraid to make a change, too worried that straying too far from the path will immediately brand them a failure.
And let us take a look – what is a failure?
I believe I have failed when I have not lived up to expectations; my own expectations, others expectations, other imaginary expectations – the list is long.
And it is a failure. It is a failure to understand that one cannot possibly achieve 100% of imaginary expectations – they are imaginary – they growth, they mutate and they turn into the very monsters that plague our nightmares.
These imaginary expectations are just the universe circling around us, swaying us one way or another, with no regard for our own mental states.
To live is to risk it all. Otherwise you’re just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.
Rick Sanchez
Why not take a risk? Bend away from the predetermined path. Empty your mind of painful imagination.
Taste the air of freedom and instead of shirking back with fear, breathe in deeply and breathe out your regret.