You Need to Kick Those Doors Open

When you are born, you have endless possibilities in front of you. But they start narrowing down the next minute.

As you live, you are forced to choose. As you do so, with seemingly irrelevant, daily, mundane choices, you start carving your own path, giving shape to your life, putting together an idea of who you are.

You went to business school, so now you can not become a doctor. You stayed in your hometown to take care of your parents, so you missed out on your chance to move to Paris.

Doors start closing. You become someone in your head, your own vision of yourself. And you make the next choices based on everything else you have chosen already, reinforcing your idea of you.

The world is not full of possibilities anymore. It is as if only a subset of the walks of life is available to you now. A middle-aged mother doesn’t leave everything behind to go teach yoga in the mountains of Nepal. Or does she?

Doors don’t close in real life, they close in your mind. Changing careers at 50, moving to a new country as a single parent of 3 kids, finally start putting yourself first… It feels like the world tells you that you can’t. But who cares about the world anyway? Your current self wouldn’t make any of these decisions either. But why do you need to stay yourself?

You can’t change the past, but the future is all yours. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, not even yourself. Everything you want is just one decision away.

“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted”

— Jack Kerouac