“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” -Mark Twain
The above, I dedicate to all the people out there who find themselves in a crossroad and are too afraid to make a decision. North. South. East or West. The choice is yours. It doesn’t matter as long as you don’t stay in the middle of the crossing reaching nowhere. Eventually, you will realize that there is no right or wrong choices in life. What matters in the end is how you made the most out of it; how you lived your life towards the fulfillment of your dreams; how you strived to get out of your mediocre existence; how you learned to care, love, and even forgive those who hurt you along the way.
The average human lifespan is about 80 years. The first 15 years of which you spend with your parents. If you are lucky and still have a clear head by the time of your death, that gives you 65 years of having most of the decisions in your life by yourself (provided you don’t marry a dictator). If you sleep 8 hours per day in that 65 years, you are basically asleep for about 20 years, leaving you only 45 years of waking hours.
Forty five years. That’s barely half a century! The age of the universe is around 14 billion years. Humans have been walking the Earth since 195,000 years ago. And what is 45 years compared to that? Not even a blink of an eye in a person’s lifetime, if I may borrow that tired cliché.
So in 45 years of your waking existence, are you then willing to just stand on the harbor and watch the world go by?
Regrets are for losers. Just effin’ do it, man!
Last Wednesday (27/4) was exactly ten years ago since I received that confirmation email from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg that I was admitted to one of their International Master’s Programmes. Ten years hence and I’m still in Sweden. The only regret I have is that I gave too little time in nourishing the friendship I made with people I have met along the way (both in real life and online). This is something I am continuously striving to change about myself.
The entry above is a repost and was originally published on 2007-08-30, http://metrobloggen.se/mogli/just_do_it/. I was cleaning my email account and found that old email from the coordinator of the master’s programme and somehow it brought back that feeling of uncertainty as I was weighing options whether to move to Sweden or not. Then I remembered that Mark Twain quote, leading me to the blog entry.
Brown in the Land of Blues and Blondes 