In our millennial day and age, we tend to stick to extremes. Religious versus secular. Gym addicts versus "will lift a pizza box at most." Vegans versus "eats pepperoni pizza every night." And extremely determined versus lazy, scared and completely unmotivated. All the above share the same quality: the latter does not have the motivation to move from their end of the spectrum to the prior, or at least somewhere halfway. Naturally, not all extremes are plausible, but the drive between each end is distinct.
This summer, I knew I had several months of playing hooky after finishing everything I had planned for the year and awaiting a new, exciting cycle overseas in the fall. I had saved up the means and the time to do what I have not been able to do before. The fjords of Iceland have been my screensaver for well over a year, and I have been meaning to visit Iceland as far as I can remember. Now would be the perfect time, one would think. Iceland is one of the safest nations in the world, where most people speak English and one can easily travel solo.
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However, I found a million excuses not to go. I was scared to be a lone female traveler. I was scared the weather would be unfavorable. I was afraid to be lonely. As a result, I didn't go. I also didn't even go to visit my friend in Puerto Rico because, once again, I made a thousand excuses.
Now, I would not like to think that I am over at the lazy or unmotivated end of the spectrum completely, but I am at the fearful and not enough ambitious end. In the end, if I could find the spirit to go I could have went, but I didn't. "Why?" I still ask myself and have no answer.
But a recent encounter made me rethink my fear a whole lot. I met a Frenchman who just moved to East Harlem from Lyon six months ago with his wife and two small children. He was well-off back in France with an acting school and a fruitful career. But his lifelong dream was to live and thrive in New York City. He even named his children American names and watched "Friends" for days on end to capture the essence of language and culture. At quite a young age, he sold everything back home and moved to find himself at an internship and tutoring students. He is absolutely elated to be living his dream, even though he is still working on it.
I would like to believe that one day I could give up everything for a dream, but realistically I know I probably would not have the guts like my French tutor. We are dreamers. That's it. That's the end. Unfortunately, we do not always know the means of working hard to achieve such, or we just do not have the motivating force.
All these quotes and mottos online urge us to follow our dreams and to believe, but what if we were told that we will be discouraged, we won't be 100 percent optimistic. Even if we do everything we can we still won't achieve the desired results. Would we be disheartened? Probably.
Though fear, lack of enthusiasms and precautions are human emotions because one cannot possibly be confident all the time. We fear that these emotions are not enough to accomplish goals and they are the one's that hold us back. So to my unhappened travels, if that is really what I'd like, I need to suck it up and go. I'm not an ultra-positive blogger, nor am I completely reckless, but I'm human and I want to see Iceland.
