With all the crazy unofficial “national days” we have, I doubt I’m the only one to feel refreshed by the national day designed to motivate. National “Walking Around Things” Day (April 4th), National “Open an Umbrella Inside Day” (March 15th) and National “Lumpy Rug” Day (May 3rd) can step aside. This is the national day we need!
National “Just Do It” Day falls on January 24th, and what better time than a few weeks after making our New Year’s Resolutions? Week three into a new year is when we begin to lose motivation; we let our diets slide, abandon our gym memberships and leave those first three sentences of our memoirs to stew for the next decade.
My first ‘Just Do It’ moment came in January 2015 when after four years of 9-5, me and my partner decided we wanted to do something life-changing. We decided to travel to South America. Practically, the odds were against us. Travelling meant time and money by the bucket-load, and we had little of either. It was decision time. Did we stay in our cozy flat and continue along the secure path of employment? Or did we drop everything and travel the world?
What would you have done?
We scrambled for seven months to save every penny, and though the budget was tight, we were good to go. Once my partner finished college, I quit my job and we jumped on a plane to Peru. What followed was three months of heaven as we journeyed through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. Machu Picchu, hang-gliding over Rio and a 42-hour bus journey through rainbow mountains and night-time thunderstorms.
Neither one of us could scrape together a regret between us.The big decisions we have to make are often laced with doubts. But we give them more weight than they really have, and let our dreams come to a standstill. While we might feel like we are standing on the edge of a cliff without so much as a parachute, take a leap of faith. There’s every chance something amazing will happen.
Let National ‘Just Do It’ Day be one day in your year where you do something close to you heart without holding your doubts over your own head like a guillotine that will end life as you know it if things go wrong. Things will go wrong, perhaps catastrophically, but you will still have your head. (And that’s the important bit!). This will be the day you sign up for cooking school, begin pole dancing classes or pick up the tuba for the first time. This National ‘Just Do It’ Day, just do it!
Featured image via Unsplash
