The Louvre

Sometimes life goes the way you want it to, sometimes it doesnt. Sometimes the monotony and repetition of life is such you cant help but feel tired and worn down from it and somehow life just seems a drowsy and grey. Sometimes life is as confusing and akin to monkey with a tutu and a gun on and rampage with methadrone on a drip ?! (...you get my point). I find the older you get and the more and more 'supposively wiser' you get you realise that some of the first things your ever taught are the truest. I dont mean your ABCs or CAT, DOG or DAD, I mean the truisms and old sayings, that often old sayings which my mother told me over and over again like 'pot calling the kettle black', 'I want never gets', 'life is what you make it' and so on. Now I find myself a wanting, hypocratic life junkie....great ha. The subject of this blog is the latter saying of 'life is what you make it'. It is so so true. When you hear that phrase or perhaps say it to yourself, you assume, quite rightly in many ways its meaning refers to going out professionally and making something of yourself, get a good job, have a successful career and so on. That is what I would typically read it as, and I think it would be fair to do so. But if you think about it, it is so much more than that. Life is what you make it is so so many ways. Life is what you make it with everything. literally anything. I think to have that phrase in the back of your mind in everything you do, its a powerful way to think. This blog, like many was prompted by events in my life, some quite significant and some entirely insignificant. For example, I was out at Loughborough union yesterday, waiting in a que. I noticed around me was a rather unusual, significantly larger distribution of superheros...yes surperheros (alarm bells struck at the obvious and imminent event of freshers from falk-egg). Of which I turned around to one in close proximity and asked 'oh, so what is your super power then?' of which she rather unexpectedly replied 'I have the superpower of optimism'. I was rather taken back by that comment, I thought it was genius.

If you ever get a chance to do something that you feel is perhaps out your comfort zone, something which is challenging, something unusual. Just do it. Be comfortable with the uncomfortable (hopwood, 2009). Life really, really is just too short. It is those things which in the end define who you are. They shape and mold you into someone, they fill the void of ignorance. We all start with a blank canvas in life, and it is purely, us and us alone that paints the picture in our own style, feeling and finish. In 2006 I sat in a pub with a very good friend of mine and discussed the possibility of really doing something. Something we considered big. He threw a couple of ideas across the table, one of which was to cycle a long way. By the following week we had begun planning to cycle through France, Calais to Marsailles, and that summer we did exactly that, all 660 painstaking miles. Just a phenomenal experience, I have never felt so free and never felt so amazing in the most purest way possible and yet I had never been through something of such endeavor.

The consequence of this, was that my friend and I then both went off to university. Myself to Loughborough and him to Oxford. In 2008 he was talking to a group of friends at Oxford, of which later transpired and developed into them wanting to cycle London to Paris. He then invited me and another friend to join. That summer 8 of us put two wheels to the road and yet again I found myself cycling through rural france. We I began that cycle, I knew two people. After going through something like that with anyone, you soon grow attached and close to those around you, and I found that. I look back at those times, countless times, countless experiences sitting on a rail in Canterbury, in a fountain at Dover, on top of a shed (after a hill of death), the soggy/diseased dog, ping-pong every single one I look back and remember so very vividly and the people who I went through that with I reflect back so fondly. That week, led me to meet someone who changed my life forever, and will continue to do so undoubtedly. I met Dougal, of whom I dated for just over a year and a half. No words would ever do justice to the story of france and the events that followed and the experiences I had. This blog could try, and it would fail. But this blog, like the Louvre, to me it a symbol and snippet of something I find absolutely beautiful and amazing. That is the power of an idea. All of this, all of what I have just described came from an idea, that I with a friend followed. I would not be who I am, or where I am today without that one decision. That one choice, and for that I could not say and convince you enough that you should always follow your ideas, follow your instinct and how you feel, because without it you only miss out on really what should of been, good or bad. No matter the consequences of events, you reflect back on them and you cant help but think that it was the most amazing thing yo happen to me and you are so glad life took you down that path. I for one, would do it all over again given a split second chance....