taking chances or why I am convinced I'll never win at life 1

Have you ever wondered if the life you are living is the life you really want or if its simply the life you can have, the one you settled for because you were either too afraid to go for the life you really wanted and perhaps have grown too comfortable with to try something new?

I have been asking myself these questions for several years now, since I turned 27, convinced that it was brought on then by the impending big three-oh, stirring myself into a mini-crisis of self doubt and self-recriminations. I am now 31 and I still do not know any better. I have pondered on the above questions on and off in the past four years, specially whenever I would come home from another trip abroad. Those trips always trigger a mini-crisis in my head, causing me to become antsy and feel needlessly unfulfilled.

Not that I don't know the reason for my discomfort, I am aware that the fault lies with me, because it is typical of my character to become too entrenched in my habits and routines, embracing the life I am living and never mustering the courage to take a stab at the life that I want.

The life that I want. A loaded phrase, certainly, the bigger problem however is that I cannot seem to determine what it is that I want out of life. I have countless journal entries containing the same theme to no avail. All I know is that I live a very narrow life.

Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage Anais Nin once wrote, and she's probably right. Because watching from the sidelines, never taking a chance on anything, translates to a narrow and boring existence. No wonder I love taking refuge in the books and stories that I read. It's funny because I only figured it out when my horizons expanded. I am quite certain I would never have these rumblings of discontent if I never met the people I have met in the past two years.

However, regardless of that, I've learned a couple of things in my 30-odd years of existence. For one, I've learned that being adept at fence-sitting means that I should just wave goodbye to my grand notions of happy endings. Because I have learned that unless you take a chance on something, there are no rewards, no chances at a happy ending. And I am not referring here to happy endings in fairy tales, where you find your prince charming and other such nonsense; I am talking of personal fulfillment, of finding your own bliss.