Making Bold Choices About eight years ago I, at the end of ninth grade, I was attending a strict elite

school in my home country. Education was understood as the transfer of knowledge, and preparation for university and career-life. Because this way of teaching didn't inspire me, I was lost in thought most of the classes, and as a result I didn't perform well. The solution at hand was to start taking medication to help me concentrate and thus improve my grades. And It worked. My scores went up, but along with it, I lost the joy for life, and eventually I even became scared of life. The underlying idea of what I encountered in that school is the rm belief that if we lead our lives according to a given norm, things will be ok. It tells us that if we but follow the path that is laid out for us, the system will take care of the rest. This belief is, in fact, built in to the very society that surrounds us. It centers around safety, study, career and paychecks. It gives meaning to pension funds and savings accounts, mindless consumption and all-in holidays. But the idea that everything will be ne if we follow this beaten path, is dead wrong. Our current societal habits, which are supposedly surrounding us with safety, are creating a mess on a global scale. There is extreme imbalance in the distribution of material needs, there is a plague of depression and spiritual poverty in the West, and as a species we have caused a threatening biosphere collapse. Business as usual is, in other words, not even beneting the small elite that believes the system was created for their benet. Worse still, it reduces life to a plain chase of values that were created articially and which block our the deeper potential of humans individually and collectively. However, the understanding of the failure of today's dogma's opens up a beautiful invitation to take a more poetic approach to our lives. Just like there are few rules in art, we must trust in our intuition so that our lives themselves become our greatest artistic masterpiece. Following the heart is something that many have written songs about, but few have actually done. The tools we have are observation and truthful inquiry. They ask of us to simply observe and inquire our thoughts, our habits, our feelings and our beliefs, even those which we once took for absolute truth. A truthful observation reveals the patterns that hold us back. The most important deed then, is to make bold choices. Make choices from a place of trust, rather than from the fear that it might be the wrong one. It might have you swim against the stream, against conventional believes, but it will make your life rich in experience. A rst of those bold choices, and one that requires enormous courage, can be to speak out your concerns and wishes to your peers. This will allow you to connect with like-minded people, which is essential in the development of our higher potential. Eight year after I switched schools, my life has taken turns which I could never foresee. I have taken choices which came out of mere intuition rather than reasoning, and which only make sense when I look back on them. I now nd myself in the Philippines, following a strong calling, and things are starting to unfold which are incredibly exciting, even in their earliest stage of existence. So travel, do, observe, and follow, make mistakes, and do it again. You will nd that your direction in life might remain unclear, but it is in the diversity that this creates which builds the tools you will nd useful later on. May your life be rich, and blessed with courage and adventure. Thijs (Tintin), born 1986, studies journalism in Belgium but lives in Sweden. He is involved in several innovative (and some not so innovative) projects, but his main focus remains the exploration and study of life itself, and the potential that lies ahead.