I am a big believer in that things happen for a reason. I think every little thing that happens in life, whether it is positive or negative, has some greater meaning behind it and its a little sign for the universe telling us life will be okay.

For example, it was Wednesday night at about 1:30 in the morning and everyone in my house was asleep apart from me. I had been having a somewhat stressful week and I needed a good dose of inspiration, I opened youtube on my phone thinking I could find something funny to make me laugh and take my mind off of things, and instead, I stumbled upon Mindy Kailing's Dartmouth commencement speech. At a whopping 17 minutes and 34 seconds, the speech was funny, inspiring, and exactly what I needed to hear.

The main point of the speech?

Let it go.

Some things in life are not in your control, I think that is a hard reality to accept, especially as college students, because we go through life thinking that we can decide the outcome of it. What type of person we marry, how many kids we have, what our incomes will be. We spend so much time dwelling about the future and going over our 'Checklists' (as Kailing put it in the speech) that we forget to realize that not everything in life is down to this precise scientific order that must be fulfilled in order to achieve our full potentials. Because the harsh reality is, life does not have a game plan. We are not born with a set of rules and guidelines that tells us how we should live or what we should be, but instead, we are shaped by the events that occur in our lives, some of which are out of our control.

A comfort zone is a place that people fall into, life isn't great but it isn't awful, we are content. We have things that we look forward too, and somethings that we may regret but essentially we enjoy living in this bubble that promises nothing extraordinarily harmful, yet nothing exceptionally great. We ask for things that we want and receive things that we need instead. we begin to realize that this precise world that we have devised for ourselves sometimes falls apart and we find ourselves at a loss not knowing what to do.

My perspective?

Let it fall apart. That is what I am telling myself to do. Let everything hit rock bottom, let go of all preconceived notions that you once had, eliminate fear, fear of failure, fear of overwhelming success, fear of loss.

Let down your walls.

Allow life to hurt you and tear you apart. Test your limits, find out what you love, not what you like. Realize that the only certainty of life is that we are given a set number of years to live and that we may choose to live in comfort not knowing who we could really become or stand up and say 'why not me' and live a life that we only dreamed we could live.

Work hard, put comfort on the line, risk what you have and if it fails, try again. You set the limits for yourself. As JK Rowling said "rock bottom is the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life' so allow yourself to fail, do not fear failure but welcome it. Embrace it. Thank it for showing you the areas in which you need to improve, then, conquer it. No one can decide what you should do in your life or where you can go.

Find morals and stick to them, find people that you love and stand by them, find something to believe in and worship it. whatever it may be, find it, work at it, and become the best at it, regardless of what people may think or say. Find your fear and use it to your advantage, welcome change, and change for yourself for the better. Everyone's path is different, what may have worked for one person may not work for you and vice versa. So stop caring about what people think you should do and do what you want to do instead.

Life is not meant to be comfortable, it is meant to be extraordinary.