When things do not go the way you had planned….

“It should not have happened like this”
“But this is not how I imagined it”
“I thought it would be different”
You have had these thoughts at some point of your life, right? When you think that something is easy but after all it is harder than you could have ever imagined. When you think you will achieve something but after all you fail. When you organise something important and in the end it gets blown to pieces. Those are the moments in which you feel like quitting, you feel that the only solution is to give up, to just admit you can’t do it and crawl back to safety. Just go home and stay there until everything has passed and you feel ready to face the world again.

And right at that moment, right when you think of quitting, that is when you should take out your little “scale” and “weight the importance of each decision”. What will happen if you quit? What will you lose? What will you gain? What are you fighting for? Is it worth to keep fighting for it?

Maybe your life will be better if you just decide to stop trying and take the easy way out. You will definitely feel relaxed, you won’t be as stressed since you already know that you do not have to try for something and of course you will finally get some long-wanted rest. You will not have to deal with the people that made your life hard any more. Maybe you will return to your parent’s house and let them take care of the bad things in life. Maybe you will go back to your friends, or to your partner or maybe you will even find a better thing to fight for.

But then there is also the hard way. The way that you actually have to put effort into. If you choose it then you will probably have to deal with all the people that want to make your life hard, you will have to overcome all the obstacles  so that you can meet your goals. You will have to face your fears, head on and you will probably feel tired and depressed most of the time. After all those hardships though and all the rubbish you will have to go through, at the end of the seemingly endless tunnel you will be rewarded for all that effort. You will achieve your goal and feel the sweet taste of success! Hopefully now you are feeling better about yourself, about how strong and persistent you are. Now you are ready for the next challenge.

Will you fight or will you quit? Will your goals be met or they will remain dreams? Will you be strong enough to come out of that fight undestroyed? The only way to find out is trying. So think of your choices, take your decisions and go forward!

Written by Kyriakos Avgoustis, AEGEE-Heraklio