Live for the moment

It is always fun to dream. To fantasize that you are someone else, somewhere far far away. Someone who has escaped mundane daily life and is living an exciting new adventure. Something much more inviting than the one you are currently living. A world where you’re the star, where there are no problems and worries. Where everyone loves you and you love everyone, and sometimes where life is merely one big party.

There was once a young girl who had dreams of making it big (then again, don’t we all?). She was dissatisfied with the life she led because she thought it to be far too ordinary. She waited long for her big moment, where someone famous would come and whisk her away to an exciting life, the very life of her fantasies.

To cut a long story short, she spent the better part of her life dreaming. This is not to put down those who dream, for everyone does and must. But dreaming is very pleasant so long as you are not forced to make your dreams a reality. The actualization of dreams, the move towards a better life (as once envisioned) is the hard part. It’s the part where the fun is removed from dreaming and the work comes in.

So this lass continued with her dreaming, and the years passed by. Never once did she pause to value what she had. She did have a fair many chances to realize her dreams, for there were plenty of opportunities that had come her way in life, so many chances to change the way she lived into the way she desired to live.

Every time a chance was presented to her, she would think it over carefully. She would brim with anticipation at the prospect of a better, happier life (the grass is always greener on the other side), and the cautious side of her would scream that she was making a mistake. That she should not go ahead with what she thought would help her realize her dreams, for she would look back and regret it.

The wild side of her would scream back, that making mistakes is inevitable and that we will never know what we can truly be until we try. That life is all about taking risks (mostly calculated ones), and that if we don’t, we will go back to where we came from, because we did not have the courage to say yes to a world different from what we’ve known.

It would suffice to say that her cautious side won over, and she turned down opportunity after opportunity. Eventually the offers stopped coming in, and while she still dreamt of them, she no longer cared anymore. She’d resigned herself to accepting that this was what she would always be – a dreamer, albeit one without the courage to act on those dreams.

When the end of her life had neared, she took one long, hard look at all that had passed. She let herself be plagued by regrets, regrets that she had lived in the future and not the present. She had waited her whole life for that one ?moment? of fame and glory, and somehow, when she had the chance to allow that moment to seize her, she would shut her doors and turn away, fearing that she might be making a mistake.
And she is not the only one, for there are many of us who wait for that one moment. We let ourselves be washed over with longing for that which is not ours, and subsequently, feelings of discontent, for we are not living the glamorous lives we imagined.

We should live for the moment, not caring whether there will be another one or not. We should seize what life has to offer, however little or much it may be, and not wait for the ?next time? to come round. For many a time, we are not offered a second chance. Rather than spending the rest of our seemingly chance-less lives looking back and wishing that we’d taken the chance that we had, we should live in the present and do that which our heart urges us to do.

For it is then that we will find true satisfaction, then that we will be able to die knowing that we have lived our lives to the fullest.

About the author:

Of an almost insane obsession with fiction, and the power of the printed word
Of strong vibes of precocious-ness and contradicting easy tears
Of various harebrained plans and sketchy schemes to change the world
Of a desire to see true equality, and to make it happen
Of natural highs from the color pink, and stuffed animals
Of not being able to have too much chocolate
Of silly decisions made on impulse
Of being undeniably, unnecessarily confused at small things
Of a heart that pushes back logic and a mind that favors emotion
Of unexplained silences and sudden outbursts of conversation
Of the quintessential desire for good conversation abiding above all else
Lies the essence of my being

Author: Kimberly Fernandes- Qatar