On Living The Life You Want.

Laguna Beach, California, April 2012.

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ Alice speaks to Cheshire Cat.

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where–’ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

-Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

A large part of how you live your life, is how you choose to live your life.

Met an old friend from Singapore recently who’s going through a bit of a mid life crisis (he’s in his late 30s).

For the longest time he loved classical music and wanted to be a musician, someday being part of a world reknown orchestra.

But life happened, years fly by, you get older, you get stuck in a job with financial security.

It’s sad to hear and see it happen, it’s scarier to know I could end up exactly like that without knowing.

So I told him it’s still his choice to make, on how he wants his life to be. Like the speech in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button: ‘It’s never too late to be who you want to be.’

The thing I’ve come to realise about how so many of the decathletes are also amazing people and doing amazing things with their lives, is that because becoming a decathlete is a choice you make, rather than something you fall into.

Everybody is here because they chose to be.

Nobody has to do it, nobody is asking us to go through all that brutal training, nobody is pointing a gun to any of our heads to finish a deacthlon (not to my knowledge of course). We do it because we chose to.

And along with that, how we live the other aspects of our lives also boils down to our choices to.

Yes there are the limitations of time, money, geographical restrictions and other inconveniences, but like any other hurdle in our way we choose to get over it.

Another decathlete here works for a country’s diplomatic mission and ends up travelling around the world in private jets and what have you not. We were chatting about life the other day and he said this line that struck me as the ethos of our lives, ‘It’s up to you isn’t it? You choose the life you want to live.’

Whilst I couldn’t promise my friend that he’ll ever be part of the orchestras he wants to be part of (the top guys in the world have trouble getting in), I could promise him that he would have an amazing journey trying and that he could be a musician the moment he chooses to be.

But the hard part actually isn’t choosing, it’s about daring to let go of the status quo and take a step into the unknown.

This is the part that I struggle with daily as well, because on all accounts we could get along just fine and live on as how we did yesterday.

But like my friend I don’t want to live like how I am yesterday anymore.

Be the person you want to be today; walk, talk and make the decisions he/she would make now, not tomorrow, not any other day.

I have also made a decision that I will work as hard as I can to make my dreams a reality, having learnt the lessons of my past failure as I’ve mentioned in the previous post.

If someone out there in the world is working harder than me at any point of time, then I can only blame myself for still not succeeding.

Time to reinvent ourselves.

To understand and live now, everything of yesterday must die. – Bruce Lee