The one thing promised in this life is death. You might make the argument that taxes are inevitable too, but people survived long before us without taxes.
The point is, the mere fact that we are alive is more than a miracle. The odds of being born are four hundred trillion to one. You cannot even comprehend how lucky that is. That is the equivalent of winning the lottery 1.33 million times. That is just being born, without taking into account that you are alive right now, living and breathing and reading this article. Imagine if you were born in a time of childbirth without modern medicine. You, standing or sitting or lying here on this earth, at this time, with a working brain, moving limbs, and beating heart is the greatest miracle in the entire world.
“If being born is the greatest act of creation, what are we supposed to do after that?”
—Finn the Human (voiced by Jeremy Shada), Adventure Time, Season 6, Episode 25: “Astral Plane.”
I am not going to even attempt to try to decipher the meaning of life, but to merely give you a new perspective. If you take a look at yourself right in this moment and ask yourself what is the one thing that is stopping you from accomplishing everything you have ever wanted in life, what would you say? Asking out that girl; complete financial independence; just being friends with a person that you would not normally interact with. I guarantee you it is fear.
Fear is the one limit that holds everyone back from anything they want. The fear of rejection, loss, or embarrassment may cause you to not act, and stay safe in your little shell. I think that fear is an acronym that can mean one of two things:
Face Everything And Rise
Or maybe:
Forget Everything And Run
You can either step up and face your fear, or you can run from it. If you think the pain in the moment is worse, then the pain of regret, knowing that you could have done more and you wasted your potential for greatness, is a million times worse. If you really want to get in shape and go to the gym, you must endure the pain of lifting in the moment, and if you stop, it is just proving that you really don’t want it badly enough.
I learned to endure pain and confront fear by running. Coach Todd Stewart has a poster on his office door with a simple sentence:
“Run easy” is an oxymoron.
At first, I had no idea what that meant, but I later learned it means that there is no such thing as running easy. Frankly, I think that running cross-country is one of the hardest sports one could participate in. The fact is, I hate running. I think it is pure torture, just pushing your body to the absolute limit, feeling pain in places you did not even know pain could exist. There really is no fun to it. Practices are just more running, more and more pain. The ironic part of it is that the only way to get better is even more running, harder till the point that it gets easier, and once it does, you are still trying your hardest to hit your new limit, keeping the cycle going.
You might ask “Why would you ever willfully, ever, in your right mind, choose this sport?” Trust me, I have doubted my commitment to cross-country more than anyone in the world: just ask Coach Stewart. The fact is, I am not the greatest runner in the sport, though I don’t think I am the worst either. If pressed, I would say I fall into the top sixty percent of cross-country athletes. The reason I do this sport is because, as Jack Benoit ’27 would say, “it is for the reward.”
The sport is not a one hundred percent test of whose legs can move the fastest, but who can hang on when they think they have completely nothing left in the tank and still push themselves. It is an indescribable feeling out on the final chute, triangular flags on both sides of you, a sea of people lined up against the flags, hundreds of phones recording your every move, and people screaming like they are on fire. The finish line is in sight a hundred meters ahead of you, and when you are gasping for breath, the tips of your toes are numb as you try to give it every last drop of what you have, but you are in an indescribable amount of pain, and then your foot crosses the finish line.
Let me tell you from the bottom of my heart, there is no better feeling in this entire world than finishing a good race, knowing that you really, and I mean really, gave it your best. All the blood, toil, sweat and tears of training was worth it. There is no way to describe the feeling that your hard work, every stride and every step is proof that you put your mind to a goal and you achieved exactly what you were reaching for. The way I see it, if I can do something I really don’t like such as running my heart out six days a week for around two hours a day, then doing something like my homework for an hour every night does not seem so bad. Every time I run, it is just proving to myself that no matter what bad stuff comes my way, I can always keep moving forward, because I have endured something as hard as a Cobbs Hill repeat workout.
Besides not living in fear, what should we do with our lives? Whatever makes you feel complete. When you are lying on your deathbed, you should have no regrets, not wishing you did more, or achieved something you did not. As far as we are concerned we have one life, one chance, one opportunity, and then it ends. We need to live every day like it is our last, because one day it will be, and we don’t want to regret it. You can be Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, but when it is all said and done, in a thousand years we will all return to dust. I encourage every single person to just be yourself, do what makes you happy, and looking back, you will have zero regrets. Take a chance: the worst thing that could happen is you land back in the position you are already in. Is this the year?