Don’t Avoid Your Dreams and Desires
Consider for a moment how it might feel to deliver your final lecture. Not an address meant to dazzle strangers, but rather your final body of work. The desire to embellish, to show off, to impress, would be unnecessary, because there would be no other opportunity to fix any mistake.
That perspective changes everything.
Everyone puts off living with incredible certainty. People put off having certain conversations, going somewhere they want to go, writing the book they want to, and taking the risks they know they should. People believe that someday there will be a more appropriate time because time has a contract.
Time has never signed such a contract.
We talk about the future like we own it, when the truth is that it is merely a projection based on probability. The one thing in life that has ever been real is the present. And it is the very thing that we keep sacrificing for a future that constantly slips further away. This is not a case of irresponsibility. This is a case against procrastination.
There is a strange illusion that suffering today automatically guarantees happiness tomorrow. It doesn’t. Sometimes all it guarantees is a lifetime spent becoming excellent at waiting.
There are many people who get themselves confused with being ready and making progress, and they keep sharpening their axe even when there is no tree left to chop down. They gather knowledge that they never use, make plans which they never carry out, and hope for assurances that life does not offer.
It is often surprising that, on our deathbeds, we rarely remember the achievements listed on our resumes.
Rather, it is those unexpected journeys, the friend that stayed by our side during troubled times, the happiness of an unexpected laugh on an ordinary day, saying yes when it was easy to say no.
Life is not determined by achievements but by experiences that make us feel distinctly alive.
Problems are going to come no matter whether you follow your passion or choose to neglect them. Being disappointed is not something that happens only to people who dare to take the chance.
It’s only people who don’t take chances that end up feeling sorry about it. If problems cannot be avoided, then better endure them and create a life where you’re true to yourself.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is not dying with unfinished goals. It is discovering, too late, that you spent your healthiest years protecting a version of yourself that was created to satisfy everyone except the person who had to live with it.
If this were your final lecture, would you still tell yourself to wait?