People just do nothing
May 6, 2018
It’s Easter holiday and since almost all my friends in Cardiff have gone back home, I decided to take a train to Southampton to visit my best friends after a long two months of not seeing them.
Well perhaps in your mind you’d be like “oh wow good on you son! Going away from the sheep county and explore Southampton like a tourist yeah?” Truth to be told I’ve been spending all my time in the Hartley Library in Southampton uni. Titanic museum? Nah aint no body got time for that when your Case Study is due in 3 days and you have to crank out 30 pages. But best friends being best friends, we always made time to chill in the living room, including Tunde, who was incredibly sick so he wrapped himself with 3 duvets and bedsheet covers so we could sit in the living room and chat about why Usain Bolt’s ability to run was purely genetics.
Tunde is undoubtedly one of the most motivated person I’ve ever met in Southampton and he had been inspiring to the lot of us; he keeps finding ways to make himself motivated such as finding the best sleeping pattern to keep himself motivated to build Cluttr (a house management app, you should totally use it if you are sharing a house with your mates and you’ve seen dumpsters in better conditions than your house). Motivation is contagious, both Mifu and I have been trying his various tricks to get our motivations back on track. While some of the black magics work, there are quite a few that’s just straight up bollocks.
But hey, at least we tried you know; and “try” is the keyword.
To be frankly honest, we are only born to survive; and if all you aim for is to make it through the day then except hunting for food we are born to do nothing, like a lion yarning in the open field, and only making a move when you hungry.
To put it this way, everything in this world obeys physics, including the law of inertia. If we are used to waking up at 2pm unless there’s something important waking up at 5am will only boost your productivity for so long before you fall back to your own pattern.
Rules are meant to be challenged, habits are meant to be changed; when you do make a change, you gain and you lose something, sometimes significant, sometimes not; but it shall never mean they should never be challenged, and because of the change, you know more about yourself, you experience more, and you start to compare.
Oli is my gym partner in Cardiff, and while we have exactly the same upper body strength, he dreams of getting Captain America’s physique, including his habit of skipping leg day. And he totally lived by it; every time whenever I asked him to do squats with me he was like “oh I’m not ready for leg day bro”. And there is a day when he decided to “screw this, I’m joining you for a full leg day”.
You will never be ready. The future is promised to no one. We will never be ready for anything, houses might get burnt down tomorrow, your roof might collapse tomorrow and World War 3 might start in the next 10 seconds. We can never fully anticipate the future, and staying in your lane will never get you anywhere. The same as, you will never be ready for leg day, until that dreadful day comes and you make your way to the gym.
Fun fact: remember the previous blog about me skydiving? When you are sitting at the ledge of the plane and staring down at 13000ft of death there is no way to get ready, you just have to take a deep breathe, say “Jesus take the wheel!”, do a flip of faith and tumble your way down to hell.
I am getting off-topic here, but one last thing: after going to Cardiff University for my master’s degree, a brief visit back to Southampton I realised I had been taking this one thing for granted: the time when we were in the living room in the evening, either talking smack or playing Mario Kart. Had I stayed in Southampton for my masters I would totally miss this very insignificant, yet significant detail to my daily life.