The Unbreakable Summer

Living, and living fully, necessarily comes with all its fruits, its bitterness and its struggles. There will be moments of victory, rejoice and celebration, in contrast to harrowing defeats, inconsolable grief and darkened days. This is not something that can be avoided, albeit it can be minimized.

But why would you want to minimize something that comes with the act of taking risks? If you want to attain something in life; if you want to get a new job, to start a business, to find a life partner or anything else that is worth doing, it requires that one takes risks, and those risks necessarily imply a potential for failure.

You can coast through life – particularly in this day and age with fantastic technology – and not have to take many risks. You’d be completely fine working your basic job and going home to your comfy heaters and video games. You’d survive just fine, and if that’s all that you truly want – and this implies a lot of self-awareness, thought and conclusions – then you go for it.

But through my lived experience, that is not how most people are. I’ve met many people who are highly ambitious, passionate about ideas and desiring of more, yet for every seed of motivation that’s given to them, they don’t plant it so it may grow into something powerful, but rather scoff it down like a temporary high, then move back to stagnation. There’s a prevailing laziness, an aversion to remain consistent and to keep going towards whatever it is they’re wanting. They give out.

Are you aware that for every second, minute and hour you spend, you’re not getting a refund on it? Time is eternal, but your time is finite. You exist in this world once, you are only young once, and you are only 25, or 30, or 35, or 40, once. Don’t avoid this fact out of fear – your time is not refundable. It isn’t coming back, ever.

So why aren’t you pushing yourself towards the heights that you dream of? Why aren’t you struggling to achieve more? What is it about you and your “I’ll do it tomorrow” and “I’m too tired” that causes you to think that way? Are you truly tired and “too busy”, or are you, on some level, afraid that you’ll fail and fall into darkness?

The reality is, that if you don’t become conscious of these facts – that your time is limited and that your dreams only exist when they are actually built – you will remain in an eternal winter. There will be no spring time where the radiant explosion of progress, success and colour will enter your life. There will be no summer where the fiery passions and thunderous motivation courses through you like a raging typhoon. There will only be an endless snow storm, a storm you can barely see through, and what you see are distant dreams and goals that you’ll “maybe” have the courage to actually reach out towards “one day”.

Sit and consider your own worth. Consider your time. Think about what and where you want to be in the future. Be conscious of your own fear of failure and loss. Look deep within and identify the burning seed of summer that can never be broken if it is tempered and focused. Understand that no matter how deeply encased you are in the blizzards of winter, there is a fire within you that, when fanned, melts away and burns through all your fears and paves the way to a radiant spring and a passionate, fiery summer. You just need to fan those flames and not stop. It’s not a one and done deal – you fan them, nurture them and never let them go.

Through this, perhaps you’ll realize that within every struggle, there are seeds to a brilliant spring, and the only fear you ought to have is the fear of giving up on the time you have. But that is a choice, and you can look at yourself, in full awareness, and tell yourself that you’ll never make that damn choice again.

Don’t waste your summers.

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