Revelations

Sometimes in life you get these huge philosophical revelations, and they can come from the strangest places...

At the end of November, when I was still living in London (sniff), I went to see a stand-up gig by Simon Amstell. He's this thin guy with crazy hair, and I had seen him on Never Mind the Buzzcocks (British TV-show), where he used to be a presenter.

Anyway, what I found so funny about Amstell, is that I could relate to the things he was saying. He said that he never enjoys the moment because he's too busy analyzing it, and that he keeps living in the past and in the future, instead of focusing on the present. He said that he has trouble getting to know guys he likes, because when it gets to the point of something actually happening, he gets all nervous and flees from the situation. He questions other people too much (like the incident where he was having sex with someone, and he was still asking himself if maybe the guy was just joking about the whole thing). He also said that he envied a friend of his, who during an afternoon walk got the phone number of several girls, while he himself struggled with going up to a guy he saw whom he liked, because of his huge fear of rejection

But then he had a revelation. He was talking about being so afraid of rejection, and said: "It's always a choice between fear and love, and we should always choose love, because death is coming!!"

That idea is something I took away from the show. It's not being morbid, and saying nothing matters, because we're all going to die anyway. Well, in a way, that's exactly what he's saying, but mostly it's just another way of telling people to live every day like it's their last, which, of course, is such a cliché that you can't really say it and be serious about it anymore. But I want to use this in my own life - no matter how scared I am of rejection, I should still take a chance, because death is coming. Also, yesterday I heard someone say that if you never do anything because you're scared of what you'll lose, then you'll always lose in life. If you don't take a risk and put yourself out there, you can't win. Ever.

All of this might seem obvious, and a bunch of worn out clichés, but I think it's important to remind yourself of these things every now and then, and actually try to apply them to your own life. Failure always hits hard at first, but after a while, these things might help you see that it wasn't that bad after all. At least now you know. I sort of went along with this "choose love over fear, because death is coming" idea recently, and sure, it didn't work out the way I had hoped, but now I can distance myself from it a little bit and see it for what it was: I took a risk, and it didn't pay off, but at least I did it. And that's the most important thing.