A New Beginning

• May 15, 2012
• 1 Comment
• Blog, Life
• Posted by Ed

Friends, I have come to a realisation.

Life, it turns out, is short. Very short. FAR too short to spend it sitting at a desk, day-dreaming of all the marvellous things there are to do in the world…that you aren’t doing.

As I was stamping my way up the Three Peaks, it suddenly occurred to me that I was happy. I wasn’t just enjoying myself – I was genuinely calm, content and happy that I was, at last, DOING something. I mean sure, it was just an extended period of walking, but it was 500% more alive than I have ever felt felt sitting at a desk.

Sure, we all need to make a living, but at what cost? Life? That may sound melodramatic, but I mean it in the most sincere way. There is nothing valuable about the life I am currently living, nothing at all. There is nothing here that I will look back on with pride next week, let alone when I am too old to be physically capable of doing all the things I would love to do.

Talk, however, is cheap. Anyone can drink a few beers and rant about the importance of living life to the full, approaching each day as if it is your last, seizing the moment and so on. Bit I’m sick of the bullshit.

I’m sick of making great plans and never following them through. I’m sick of seeing other people do amazing things and pretending that they are, in some way, different from me and can do things that I can’t. It’s bullshit. I am the only thing stopping me from doing anything I want to do; if I want to climb Everest, I can climb fucking Everest – it’s that simple.

Sure, there’s training and preparation involved, but that’s the same for everybody – it’s just that some people actually DO it, whilst the rest of us sit around being shit and pretending that all manner of different things are to blame for our own tedious little lives.

More than all that, I’ve realised that unless I act now nothing will ever change. There’s nothing stopping me apart from myself. It’s only because I’m scared.

And I am scared. I’m scared for my future, scared for my financial security and scared that, in reality, these fantastical daydreams simply aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Yet, terrified though I am by life’s limitless possibilities, the alternative is far worse. The alternative is that I have to lie to myself, forever. The truth of the matter is that my life, as it is, is killing me. No matter how hard I cling on, bit by bit, the person I am is being killed off.

So I need to start over. I need to reclaim what is valuable in life and leave this mundane waste of energy far, far behind me.

I need to be authentic. I need to be real, otherwise everything else is meaningless.

So it looks like I’m going to need to quit my job…

Here we go then… Looks like I have a difficult letter to write…