#15. If not now, then when?

If not now, then when?

If not you, then who?

History is being written right now,

The story it tells,

is up to you.

I was looking through my older posts from this [instead of actually writing new content…] and one of my regrets was not doing as much as I wish I had done. Of course, that desire would naturally lend and link itself to this quote. Well, it should at least.

 

The whole phrase is more powerful than the first sentence I think. I don’t personally feel motivated from just that first sentence. Yet the whole section ‘speaks’ more to human inner ambition; everyone wants to be successful, everyone wants to go down in some sort of history, whether that history is a personal family history or global.  Our stories, our history, are written the moment we’re born. The sooner we begin doing things for ourselves, the sooner we say ‘yes’, the sooner the rewards and satisfaction. Start now and you won’t have to question when you’re going to feel regretful for not ever starting.

 

#1. When was the last time tried something new?

Moving schools: the latest new thing I’ve done. It’s inevitable when you have to spend the majority of your time in a never-been-there-before city that you have to adapt and new trends emerge. How productive and beneficial these trends have to be are debatable – the amount of productivity in from spending study periods in coffee shops instead of in the library are debatable for instance.

 

I thought I relished routines. I had been at the same school for 92% of my education, with only one rouge year of reception at a different school. I had the same friends since high school. I even had the same religion teacher throughout the whole of high school. If you had told one-year-ago me that I would leave this little ‘high school bubble’, I would have awkwardly glared and quietly left the room. ‘Why move somewhere for only two years?!’ seemed to be my automatic response when people explained of their desire to do well in their mock exams to stand a chance at leaving the safe haven of familiarity. As my mother keeps saying whenever I bring the topic up, ‘it takes a certain type of person to just uproot yourself and leave well established routines for the unknown.

 

I’ll admit my decision to leave familiar ground wasn’t exactly rational: the way I grabbed the application form from the printer was perhaps slightly too aggressive, and the escalating feeling of suffocation I was suffering from my parents probably clouded the more rational side of me when deciding to cut through the chains of my well planned, well known life routine. Regardless of how it happened, it happened, and do I regret it? No. Not at all. If anything, it has enhanced me as a person, my personality, and ultimately my self-confidence.

 

I didn’t intend for this to be a deep, philosophical piece that demands anyone who reads this to think deeply and re-evaluate their whole existence as human beings, but it’s all too easy to get stuck in a rut in our society. Too many people, arguably, become only content with life instead of live life. ‘Never be afraid to try something new, because life gets boring when you stay within the limits of what you already know.’ After all, ‘all life is an experiment.’