29.03.2022, Jasmin Schweizer
Every day we make decisions. What we wear, what we buy, what we eat, what we want to do in our free time and with whom we want to spend it. Our everyday life is peppered with decisions that are sometimes harder, sometimes easier, but do not affect our lives to the extent that it would be a matter of life and death.
But there are also decisions that are figuratively a matter of life and death. For people like me, who are in the fortunate position of living in a safe country and can ask themselves these questions.
What am I going to do with my life? Where do I want my life's path to lead me? How do I know what I really want? And can that be realized?
So I start where most people in a similar environment start. I learn something right. A profession that provides enough income to make a living. Pragmatically, according to our economic system, I join the stream of employees. That suits me, that's how I grew up. I do what everyone else does. That's how I learned and that's how I implement it.
I go with the flow - for years. I go the way most people go. Every now and then I allow myself to branch off, try something new, but I stay true to the direction of the path I've taken and after a while I always find myself back on the same path.
Is that really me? Or is that the person I am because others say that's who I am? Is that the way I'm supposed to be? What would it be like to just keep walking, taking a little turn here and there for a change? Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing where I would have to question my once chosen path, nothing where I would have to leave my comfort zone.
How much easier it is to escape into the everyday decisions, around little things! Nothing can happen to me here. Here I am safe, I don't have to risk anything, I can't lose anything. Or can I?!
Is there a system of the powerful behind it, which lulls us all into the everyday trifles, so that we think we make the important decisions, while they are only distractions from the true, self-determined life? Are all the many daily choices, where we decide what to eat, what to wear, how to spend our free time, there to fool us into thinking how important and unique our lives are, while we continue to float on the surface of existence in the same unstoppable stream of making and consuming money? How convenient it would be to believe in such a system. Life is just like that.
But something deep inside me does not let me drift on calmly. The voice that commands me to stop is getting louder and louder. I hear it from the depth of my heart FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.
It is my decision what I make of my life. And I alone bear the responsibility and the consequences that result from it. So much freedom! That makes alive! ONLY WHEN I REMAIN TRUE TO MYSELF, I'M ALIVE!
Do I have the confidence to do it? Where do I get the conviction to do what is right for me? Some days I lack the courage. On others, I tell myself it's just a game, everything's not so bad. It's good to know that it's not a matter of life and death, or at least in a figurative sense.
translated from the original German version
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