The Nights — Avicii
(Originally written on 04/10/2015)
Who doesn’t love this song? I can’t help but fall in love with it over and over again. Avicii has always been my most admired singer not to mention his cool yet inspiring songs. ‘The Nights’ is my favorite, which basically conveys the concept of ‘YOLO‘ — You Only Live Once. Note that YOLO does NOT mean you can do everything you want without giving a damn about anyone or anything. To me, YOLO is more like treasuring your life and making the most out of it.
Life is ridiculously short. “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14). Take a while to think about it. The world is 4.543 billion years old and the current human lifespan is less than 100 years. If you make it to your 70s, that’s pretty fortunate nowadays. After you die, the only people who would know you are your grandchildren’s generation, or perhaps your grandchildren’s children generation. Thereafter, no single person on earth would recognise your existence (unless you’re legendary people like Albert Einstein or Mozart, duh).
Are you aware that you can die anytime? Maybe next year, maybe tomorrow, or even few more hours. I could lose my life on my flight back to Jakarta next week. Isn’t it dreadful? And if you were to die tomorrow, are there still a lot of things you wanna say or do that you haven’t? Are you gonna have regrets? Are you gonna wish to have another chance to live your life differently? If yes, it’s maybe time to think of changing the way you live.
#YOLO1 — Whatever you do in life, make sure it makes you happy
Being happy in life is vital. While this may sound shallow and over-simplistic, isn’t ‘happiness’ what we all are seeking? I mean think about everything we do and strive for in life — I’m sure they all come down to one purpose: happiness. Simple example:
go to college > work > income > security > comfort > happiness (end of spectrum)
What I’m talking here about are not things like having to graduate from a university. Or ditching your whatever responsibility just because you don’t like doing it. But the context I’m talking about is more like….Don’t care too much about what people think by letting them dictate you what to do with your life.
I’m sure most humans are people-pleasers just like I am. But I came out to a thinking: Why do I allow other people to have so much control to how I live my life? As human beings, we want people to validate our noble self-image — we want to be approved and loved and because of this we work so goddamn hard to maintain this image. But let me tell you that when you’re being fake, you take things that are special and unique about you — you hide them under your back — and your soul is drained when you do that. In the end, what you feel is voidness.
When challenging the status quo, you’re gonna clash with people. But would you trade their validation with your life? You’re gonna die pretty soon anyway and there are much more important stuffs in life than being liked. It’s okay to hold unpopular opinions, to not fit in all the times, to not be the average, and it’s okay for people to criticise you about that. “Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you’ll be criticised anyway.”
Thus whatever you do in life, make sure it brings you joy. Get your own values and live those even though you’re not gonna have the praise or feedback that you want.
#YOLO2 — To live is to be vulnerable
A legend once said: “Being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure”. This legend is Bob Marley by the way.
Yep, couldn’t disagree. Feel nothing and be a living corpse. “As long as you feel pain you’re still alive. As long as you make mistakes you’re still human. As long as you keep trying there’s still a hope.” So would you rather feel nothing or feel everything at once? I don’t know what about you but if I have to pick between the extremes, I’d definitely choose the latter.
Joy, as well as pain, are part of a living. You can’t have the rainbow without the rain. You’ll only be able to understand true happiness through sufferings. A lot of times what we do is avoiding pains in any possible way. We avoid to get hurt as much as we could because we think being hurt is equivalent to being miserable. So we lock our heart in a safe place, end up in the comfort zones where nothing grows and never take risks at all.
Remember, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, and then you die and disappear eternally. Why don’t we try to live a little bit more fearlessly? Take chances, explore new things, love hard. Be vulnerably daring. It’s okay to make mistakes as long as we learn from it, because bad choices make good stories. Expose yourself to as many experiences and make your life unforgettable so that when you’re old and you look back, you realise you had a meaningful life without regrets.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” — C.S. Lewis
