You only live once.

A time comes in life when you have to make a choice between all you ever wanted and all you ever need. Soon the unavoidable realization dawns on you that the once self-attained super skills of juggling between the odds of survival and passion are not your cup of tea anymore. It’s either this way or that. The thought of no one ever crossing the ocean with their two feet in different boats starts to play on your mind and you are compelled to make a choice, one that none other can but you yourself.

Isaac Newton, Arthur Miller, Jane Austen, Steven Spielberg, Leonardo Da Vinci, Joan of Arc, Mother Treasa and many more great people who unintentionally set their mark on the pages of history, all had something very common between them which they didn’t achieve by fluke or by some planned way.
If you glance into their lives, and if you are observant enough you will notice a pattern that connects them all, irrelevant of the erratic differences of time, culture and circumstances that set them worlds apart Yet they were all so similar in more certain ways than we can count.

They were all people of grit, people that had the courage to withstand any storm in life and not to falter from their dreams, they were on a mission, a mission of acquiring the unthinkable, a mission that led them on to believe in themselves and to dare to question ‘Why?’, ‘How?’ and ‘What?’ and preferred to be the ‘Odd’ doing something than, the ‘Ordinary’ doing nothing more than just surviving.

And to achieve the impossible, all they ever did was to follow their hearts by doing what made them happy. Gaining triumphs of contentment, winning over dilemmas of pros and cons and the umpteen big and small challenges thrown before them in the form of survival, society, and failures that kept the furnace of determination burning within.

The path you follow becomes your destination. At the end of the road, it’s all about the way you feel. Once you are gone from the picture, who remembers you anyways. The very most a generation or two and even they have their own issues to deal with. Spending all your life trying to be what you are not is like filling a keg without a bottom, it will always be empty no matter how much you strive. You can never master something halfheartedly and nothing can stop you from if you have the zeal.

Doubt is one of the biggest monsters we create for ourselves. So what do we normally do? find an escape, an easier way by listing out our fears and making them sound and feel larger than life. And that is one good reason why so many of us are running a rat race throughout our lives and never going beyond a struggle between the heart and the mind.

It takes failures to succeed and falls to rise and if you still fall, try again and again and again, each time you fall you will learn something new which will help in constructing a newer you. And when you leave the stage at the end of the play, at least you know that you have tried your best and not going emptyhanded like the rest. After all, we only live once.

© Annadine Charles.

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