22/01/2015 - What's life without a little risk?

“What is life without a little risk?” – Sirius Black

Most of the humankind live their life based on order and routine. Our route is settled from the day we are born. First we have three years of freedom where we learn to walk, talk, eat and all the necessary things we need to survive in this world. And then we get send to school. Twelve years mandatory and then you can choose whether you go to college or university or you go looking for a job. And then you have to do that job for forty years at least and then you retire and you are free again. But when you reach that phase, you are too old to go adventuring in the woods or make big roadtrips or climb mountains or stuff like that. And you will have lived but not really because you just followed a routine day after day, year after year. Maybe you will have encountered a strange experience, maybe not. But one thing is certain: if you want to live, you need to take your life in your own hands.

You’ll have to find time to squeeze that into that preplanned life of yours. Maybe you could take a year of work to do a roadtrip across whichever land you choose. You can spend your vacation days on doing some extreme stuff. You can use the weekends to call your friends with a crazy plan. You’ll have to find a way to do the things you really want to do without deviate from that preplanned live. Or you can just say: fuck it and quit your job if you think you have enough money to do the things you really want to do.

Can you say you lived, really lived, if you strictly follow the plan that’s laid out for you? School, a job, retirement. I don’t think so. What’s life without adventure? Life on itself is a strange thing, you don’t live for eternity and you can question why we live while other planets don’t have any living creatures on their soil. But that’s an unanswerable question. You just need to accept the fact that you are a living and breathing and talking and whatever organism. And you can choose how you fill in that life that’s given to you: following the rules or taking risks. You only have one life, and sooner or later you will be death and you never know when that day will come so start taking some risks as from today.

I, personally, think that life would be boring if you don’t say yes to risky things. Not the unsafe risky things like going off-piste on a skitrip or climb a building without safety gear or stuff like that but the safe ones like rock climbing, bungee-jumping and such, things that make you feel alive again. Things that take you out of your preplanned life for a moment to make you feel that there is more to life then we sometimes think.
But there are other kinds of risks as well, risks you take to pursue your dreams for example. A personal example is sending my manuscript to a publisher (which I am planning to do as soon as the person that is proofreading it is done). You know, you can just write a story for yourself and keep it that way, just enjoying writing it or you can do something with it. It can backfire on you if the publisher says that he hates the manuscript or it could be the beginning of a lifelong dream. But if you just keep it in a forgotten map on your computer nothing will happen.

For some dreams you have to quit your job, for others you’ll have to travel to another country, but if you don’t dare to do such things, than you will just stay in that same place without seeing your dreams fulfilled.
There are three kinds of people: people who want their dreams to come true and actually doing something to make that happen. Or people that dream about certain things but don’t necessarily need them to come true, and that’s fine as well, everyone lives their life the way they want. But for the third kind, the kind that dream about things and wish they would come true but do nothing to make that happen, those people need to take more risks. A dream doesn’t come true just by itself, life isn’t a Disneymovie.

Another quote that fits here perfectly is the following: “My life is only successful if I can die in peace.”
Don’t live and wait for death to take you away and regretting things on the last days of your life. You need to do things now if you want them to happen. Because otherwise you will just regret not doing those things and you will not die in peace.
My life isn’t successful yet, I still need to do some stuff I really want to, but I think that, from the day that I did all those things, I will be less scared to die. Because I’ll know that I lived a good life.