If someone asked you what the most intriguing and complicated challenge you’ve ever faced was, how would you respond? You might pause to ponder; you wouldn’t want to be hasty. You could zoom in, shuffle through your memories packed with adrenaline and pick the one that gave you the biggest rush or the most valuable lesson learned. Or you could zoom out.
We live in society that guides us into molds that end up dictating most of our moves, our choices. We form habits as a vast community that thread themselves into what we interpret as, quite frankly, our reasons to live. Follow these suggestions and you shall “succeed” obtain an education by the means of conventional schooling, start off with a part-time job, move up a few ranks, work full time and earn a higher wage, do a few rad things, meet some people, choose one person, get hitched, have two and a half kids and die. And do you know what the most commonly professed regret of the dying is? They regret having worked too hard. Life itself is a great ongoing challenge, packed with compromises, collaboration, innovation, obligations and rewards.
Alright, so what does it really mean to have worked too hard? Did they exert themselves too often, or perhaps not leave enough time for leisure and passion? There’s nothing wrong with working hard, per se, but life nowadays seems to lack balance. Life is too long until it’s short. It’s too slow until you can’t slow down.
Though the student population at Bellevue College is a vast and diverse one, it’s not uncommon for many of us find ourselves in a common position: stressed.
With so much attention devoted to getting things done and meeting deadlines, we often lose touch with the things that we are truly passionate about. Those things are the parts of our lives from which we derive actual pleasure. When stress and anxiety override pleasure within a person’s life, their risks for various diseases and cancers rise. This is something not enough of us keep in mind when we live out our day-to-day lives. The importance of balance within life is a great one, and in saying this I hope to urge people to take some time to zoom out from their hard lives and take some time to breathe. Life is squishy. It doesn’t always have to be hard, and being busy doesn’t mean you have to over-occupy yourself with tasks.
Life is not for the taking, life is for the living. Live and let gain, but don’t live life like it’s a race or a game. Life is indeed a challenge, and the best way to get through it is to stay as healthy as possible and, well, sane. So do yourself a favor and do something to enrich yourself today. Go take a walk in nature, create art, go out of your “way” to talk to a stranger or neighbor. You’ll be glad you did, simply for the sake of being and staying “you.”