If you had the chance to be happy, and all you had to do was take a bit of a risk, would you do it? I ask myself this question whenever the opportunity arrives. I’d like to think that I’m one of those people who would choose happiness over financial stability or over societal norms that I’m “expected” to follow. I’d like to think that, given the choice, I will choose what makes me happy instead of choosing what I feel like I should choose.
More often than not, I find that people will make decisions in life based on what they feel like they should do or what society says they should do, rather than what they want to do. That doesn’t seem right to me. We are all on this planet for a reason. We are all living a life for a reason and I refuse to accept the fact that that reason is not to be happy.
It makes me sad that a lot of people in this world get up in the morning and spend all day doing something they hate doing just for financial stability. It makes me sad that a lot of people are holding on to someone in their life in fear of being alone. It makes me sad that some people choose to say silent when something isn’t right for fear of social humiliation. It makes me sad that everyone in this world lives in fear of something.
Fear is the number one thing that holds us back in life. What is interesting to me is that something as little as a simple feeling can completely alter a person’s life. One choice can be the difference between a lifetime of happiness and a lifetime of regret. If making one choice in your favor could give you a lifetime of happiness, why wouldn’t you do it? The answer is because every choice we make in life has consequences and, most of the time, fear is attached to these consequences. Could you imagine what it would be like if we all could just let go of our fear and do what makes us happy in life? I don’t know about you, but living a life of happiness seems like a pretty good life to me.
It is so much easier said than done though. I can go on and on about letting go of fear and making tough decisions to be happy, but the decisions are just that: tough. It is not easy to just take a risk and choose a path that is unpredictable. And, odds are, the path that makes you happy will be unpredictable and you won’t know how it’s going to end up in five or 10 years. But I think that living a life where you know exactly where you are going to be in 10 years is absolutely boring. Unpredictability is exciting and scary and intriguing but in no way is it boring. If given the choice, I’d choose exciting, scary and intriguing over boring any day.
