“Wherever you go… go with all your heart.” 

Confucius

Which is better: the life you choose or the life you end up with by default?

It sounds obvious, yet a lot people have ended up somewhere they don’t want be, not by accident, not even by a series of unfortunate events, but because of a lack of a clear choice— by simply drifting along the river of life.

It’s so incredibly easy not to live while we are alive. It’s so easy not to start the journey we were meant to take. It’s effortless to let life pass — and it shall pass, no matter what we do.

There is a space between who we are and who we can be, between what we are and what we can still become, and in that space is something that scares us. A gatekeeper. A challenger. A shadow. Be it responsibility, or change, or discomfort, there is a headwind against all of us.

For many, it is enough to choose to stay the same, rather than to change.

And in not changing deliberately, we accept whatever change is handed to us.

We are always changing. For better or for worse, life is a fluid mosaic, not a linear track that you can pause at any point. You get older no matter what you do. Your psyche changes constantly. The people around you come and go. The world is a perpetual sea of explosive change. There is no stopping, only choosing — between conscious change and the changes you cannot resist.

One day, you will arrive. Where will that be, and will that be by design?

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. Faced with the choice between staying as I am and pursuing further growth via medical school—between the comfort of the known and the discomfort of the unknown—I have come to realize that change will have its way with me whether I like it or not. Therefore, I may as well have my way with change by choosing the sort of change that will make be stronger. By choosing a worthy challenge, by taking up greater responsibility, by choosing the path of the hero.

Hero, I say? Am I just pumping myself up? I don’t think so. We are all heroes. You and I, we have in us that spark that can light fires and move mountains, that can create and inspire, that can make this world better than it was.

That, in my opinion, is heroic.

Yet the hero’s journey is not easy, otherwise it wouldn’t be called that. It is hard. It is bloody. It can be cruel. But it is worth it. And I think that in all of us, in every human being, there is a piece of the divine, a fragment of eternity. In all of us is a hero waiting to be born. And they are born when we choose to go forth into the world, to leave the familiar village of what we are, the comforts of what we already know, and to embrace the journey.

Where will that journey go? What will it make of you?

That’s the great thing about being alive. You get to choose. You get to write your own story. And no matter how bad things are, no matter where you’ve been, you have the power to say:

“This is not how the story ends.”