This is to my former classmate Simon who is married but he is a serial dater because he is looking for ‘the one’ even though he is married. Apparently, he doesn’t love his wife and he only married her because she accidentally got pregnant. But how do people get ‘accidentally’ pregnant? Like one day you’re walking, minding your business, and then you accidentally fall on a girl and…viola? Anyway, this is also to my friend Tony, who for the past two years, has complained to me about his job. He doesn’t love it and it doesn’t love him. So he goes to work, contributes nothing, goes home. Lather, rinse, repeat. I’m also writing this for Rita who feels stuck in a loveless marriage. So she spends her days wishing she had had a chance to marry her ex-boyfriend aka the love of her life. And to all the many, many adults who spend their lives looking out of windows like the abovementioned people. This little story is for you. When I made my choice for a course for undergraduate studies I did it purely out of juvenile vanity. What happened was that I mentioned the course I wanted to do to my father. He allowed a few minutes of awkward silence to pass before repeating the name of the course to me in a disapproving tone. He then asked me to sit down. By the time I stood up to go, he had convinced me to do a course with a respectable name. The kind which when you mention to someone, they immediately know that you are an intellectual. The kind that gets you a slow nod of approval and admiration, you can almost hear the person clapping for you in their minds. Needless to say, the criterion for a choice that was likely to affect me for the rest of my life was thoroughly flawed. It was flawed because it had nothing to do with love. And because it had nothing to do with love, I wasn’t committed. And because I wasn’t committed, I was failing miserably. At this point, I realized that I had two choices; to quit or to make it work. I decided that I had to stop wasting time looking out of lecture room windows drowned in wishful thinking and regret because it wasn’t helping me. And I was wasting time that I could never get back. I won’t talk about whether or not I quit the course because it’s not the point. (But just to satisfy your curiosity, I didn’t quit. I committed and started kicking butt at the course). The point was that I made a decision between quitting and giving my best instead of staying in-between. So what am I trying to say? To Simon, Tony and Rita, and everyone else, I think it’s time to stop looking out of the window. Be fully committed or quit. By my observation, it is better to make a bad decision than to live in fear of making one.
