On Being Brave: A New Year’s Resolution
January 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
A colleague of mine, who is around 15 years my senior, handed me a news article. The article is about how the unhappiest people in the world are those that often think about the future, those that cannot live in the moment. Prior to that, he told me in one of our conversations that it was his principle to enjoy the present as much as he could. He told me that for an ‘old’ man like him, the future was not something that he should worry about.
Growing up, I remember planning my life, making sure that everything was in order. I had to do well in high school so that I would get admitted to the so-called premier university in my country. And so I got admitted to the university and managed to graduate on time. After graduation, I planned on giving myself two years before I go to graduate school. I thought it was cool if I was able to complete my master’s degree at a relatively young age. Time was everything, I thought.
I am a control freak. That’s what I think at least. Things have to be in order. I take charge because I want things to happen as I have wanted or imagined them to be. I have to do something. I just can’t sit still and watch. But if there is anything that I am glad about getting older, it is that I have come to realize that more often than not, things are not under our control. This realization still freaks me out sometimes, but I can say that I have come to terms with myself about this. Spending so much time with myself over the couple of years, I have become less hard on myself. I have learned to allow myself to commit mistakes, to make decisions without over-thinking about their consequences.
I have this belief that humankind, in general, can never be totally happy. More often than not, we are sad and lonely. A lot of people I know say that everything is a choice, that being happy is a choice. For me, however, we are made to believe that we have a choice when the truth is we are not given a choice. All we can do is to live in the present, take things as they come, and then we become less sad and lonely or actually be happy. And that’s what I am going to do this year and hopefully, in the years to come.
