What is Life But a Time Bomb...

|By Parshva Shah|

I am 19 years old right now, and the memories of me shitting my pants (literally) as a kid are fresh. It's wonderful yet very intriguing how time zaps away so quickly. I was a school student a few years ago, and now, I am already into the second year of my undergraduate course.

A few days ago, I was recollecting how I used to play cricket with my friends in my building so nonchalantly, without having to worry about anything apart from my academics or whether I will be able to wake up early the next day to reach school on time.

I grew older and more mature, but so did my problems. Questions loiter on my mind incessantly. What is life exactly? Will I be able to achieve my dreams? Will I ever become a renowned sports journalist? Will I ever get over my breakup?

There is always a myriad of questions that instil a feeling of self-doubt, and given our human tendencies, we are held by the clutches of our very own fragile minds and are forced to overthink. Overthinking leads to negative thoughts emerging, and that, in turn, leads to losing confidence in oneself.

What I have learned from these encounters is that there is so much more to life than we think. It all depends on one's mindset, one's perception, and one's way of reacting to a particular situation.

There are always going to be problems, but are we going to be a crybaby and whine endlessly? No, absolutely not. We must change the way we look at things.

Life is too short to think about the probabilities, about the 'ifs and buts', and whether you will live the sort of life you have always dreamt of. Thinking too far ahead in the future and making your life more complicated than it already is, is like digging your own grave.

A lot of sportspeople are asked whether they can win a particular competition. They always respond in an optimistically diplomatic way. They say that they could win the trophy but wouldn't want to get ahead of themselves and rather focus on what's next for them.

Similarly, if we can implement a similar approach in our lives, a lot of our problems will vanish even before becoming a problem in the first place. It's clever to take an easier route and focus on one day at a time rather than thinking about the future. Set your goals, discover your passion, and do something related to it every single day of your life.

Pic from unsplash.com by Aron Visuals

The work you do every day would amount to something really promising for you in the future. Life is like a ticking time bomb. However, the explosion could go either way: it could result in something disastrous for you as you would have invested the precious time thinking about all the irrelevant things, and it could result in you reaping rich rewards for having an optimistic outlook towards your life and working hard, waking up with a lot of purpose and motivation every day.

Getting back to the introduction to this article, I mentioned about my childhood. So, how does it all relate to what I have had to say during the entire course of this article?

Well, I realized that I wasted a lot of precious time doing things that I shouldn't have, and I have also wasted a lot of time thinking about things that were never going to be in my control.

Life, in many ways, is like my school van waiting for me at the gate. It waits, but not long enough. Once an opportunity is gone, it's gone. But, did that mean I missed my school every time I was late to board my school van? Hell no! I still used to reach school, although a bit late, but yeah, I did not miss my school.

In a very similar way, you must not sit and wait for the next day or rather the next opportunity. Life requires us to adjust to make the most out of it. We need to move on, be as optimistic as we can, and work on ourselves and our future, for life is a time bomb.