Self-improvement: The Lunge or Leap of Faith

There are times when you realize that you're caught up in the doldrums of daily depressing repetition that you feel utterly chained to its worthless mediocrity. You can find yourself doing the same tedious work, talking to the same people entertaining the same thoughts, and doing the same things before you fall asleep every night. As these mostly irrelevant moments of your life pile upon each other like layers of snow, your embers of life is slowly buried in this frosty entombment.

At this moment, you may realize your sad life and in desperation you go for the lunge. The lunge is the last ditch effort to free yourself from the snow of repetitive nothingness that has buried your embers of life. (Heavens forbid if you find yourself so deeply buried in snow that you can't even move your feet.) A close relative of the leap of faith, the lunge is distinguished from its cousin since it is an act of desperation whereas the leap of faith is an act of free choice.

A few days ago before I flew back to the states, I encountered on the same day two occasions two girls who decided to travel spontaneously. One has taken a lunge whereas the other has taken an act of faith. The girl who chooses to quit her bartending job and travel for months in Europe since she wants to escape the daily mediocrity of her work and life is taking the desperate lunge. The girl who chooses to quit her teaching job and travel for months in Europe to gain experience in her life before she returns to a teaching lifestyle is taking a leap of faith.

If we can take a leap of faith to refresh our lives, that will be ideal. However, that is the ideal world and sometimes in this real world, the lunge, despite its nature of desperation, is the only way to radically rejuvenate ourselves and discover once more why we choose to live. The alternative is to let ourselves atrophy in a sad cocoon of reality where without outside intervention (unlikely), our accumulated apathy towards our own lives leads us to the end of our lives, either literally or figuratively. What do you choose to do?