Living an extraordinary life - a message to myself

Image by Gary Christenson

My brain is tick, tick, ticking at the moment. On the weekend some friends and I were talking about opportunities and grabbing them while you had the chance. Of taking a leap into the unknown and possibly risking what you already know. Of putting yourself out of your comfort zone and when, if ever, there was a good time to do this. No matter who you are or where you are in your life these are themes that apply.

I'm an optimist. Some call it naive. Some call it unrealistic. I don't want to live a life where I always look on the bad side. To me that would be insufferable. I believe that you can plan for the future but there's no point worrying about the bad stuff until it's right there in front of you. It's a lot of wasted energy (and wasted life) worrying about something that may never happen.

I believe that a big part of being happy is being grateful for what you have. Being able to acknowledge that you're alive and you're lucky and have so much (and we all do) is the foundation of having a good life. The cream that makes life exciting and rewarding and extraordinary is dreaming, is wanting more, is taking a risk, is putting yourself out there, is doing something unexpected. It's trying again and again. It's making yourself vulnerable. It's forgetting about what everyone else is doing and drumming to your own beat.

I encourage my kids to take a risk ("Say hello to that new kid" "You can make it other side" "You can climb up that hill""Push those pedals") because I know that the pay-off to taking those risks (which are huge and daunting to them) will be wonderful. Sure they may fall off that bike or that kid may laugh in their face, but then I encourage them to get back up and try again, because if you keep trying you'll ultimately succeed.

I really need to take this advice myself. In fact, I'm sure as adults we all need to take this advice from time to time.

Take a risk. Live a life that is extraordinary. Of course, you could always fail and probably will fail from time to time. You could embarrass yourself. You could look a fool. You could lose everything. But if you don't live your life, if you don't dream and reach out for your dreams, if you resign yourself to just passing time then you've lost everything anyway.

We all deserve a life that's extraordinary. I believe that we're all capable of achieving that. Your extraordinary will be different to mine and thank god for that. It will never be easy, life never is no matter what path you take, but at least you can leave this world with no regrets.