A few days ago while I was at work, I heard someone in our office mention something about how being in an office all day is sort of like being in a fishbowl.

It was such a breezy comment, and while it inciting a few seconds of laughter, it didn't really do much else — except, it got me thinking. Maybe it was just because I tend to overthink things, maybe all the coffee I'd had that day was starting to go to my head, or maybe it was something else entirely. In any case, while everyone else was laughing it off and moving on, I was thinking about this random idea of being stuck in a fishbowl — and you know what? I think I might have been on to something.

Being in a fishbowl in that instance applied to literally and physically being stuck in one place all day, sort of like a fish might be stuck in the office with nowhere to go. It could be that you're stuck in class all day or stuck in the library all night, or maybe just stuck inside your room. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it can mean more than that, too.

Being stuck in a fishbowl can be a state of mind. It can be a mentality. Far too often, I don't think that it's a far stretch to say that we all fall into these sort of fishbowl mentalities. We get caught up in every day, caught up in the endlessly cyclical nature of life. We get so caught up in the routine that sometimes we forget that there's a whole world out there.

Living life with a fishbowl mentality can mean living life in a routine, living life thinking that you can't break that routine, or at least, being so used to that routine that you don't even see the need or have the means to break that routine — and while routine can be good and can keep you going sometimes, it can also hold you back.

Living life with a fishbowl mentality might be keeping you from reaching your full potential. It might be keeping you from branching out, from reaching out and making new friends, new connections. It could be holding you back from taking that job that would change your life, from doing things that are so amazing, and yet, so scary — but maybe it's time to push past all of that.

Maybe it's time to jump out of that fishbowl and jump into a sea of possibilities. The world is so much bigger than you might think it is — and I think it's time to break the routine. It's time to explore.