Written by: Charnamy Marin
August 26, 2019

You Only Live Once (YOLO) and Life is Short (LIS).

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These were the common excuses of people who waste time, resources, and humanistic efforts on pseudo-significant things based on their subjective insights. Why restrict yourself if you only have one life to spare? Why restrain yourself if you could die any moment now? Why limit yourself when you could live with no regrets? These questions beguile people to live their lives to the fullest - neglecting the consequences that could happen in the near future. In the end, people neglect the bad events of the consequences of their responsibilities.

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In moments where we had to make an urgent decision, we always choose to satisfy what our pleasure and desire at that particular moment. When things started to get out of control, we always had to resort to, "Ah, bahala na," without knowing how careless decision worsened things as time passed by.

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Then, how should we deal with things? Life is too complicated to understand it through our limited thinking. No one is intelligent enough to know how things in life should be managed. However, everyone could have their ways to survive this world. One way is to know how important is the significance.

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Humans are versatile; some humans can sing and dance at the same time, work and play at the same time, or laugh and cry at the same time. In this world, the human race is the most intellectual species; so we can do a lot and better things than other creatures. As we are too capable, we tend to be confused about which matter should we focus on more. Each life has its things and people to keep with, as they perceived them significant. Yet, trivialities disguising as significance always interfere.

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In this world full of complicated, numerous, and exhausting whatabouts, learning how to weigh things out, whether it is trivial or not, is a must. Putting too many efforts, affections, and time on trivialities consume and kill our lives gradually. Instead of wasting on trivial matters, priorities must be set upon us already. As what L.M. Browning implied in his book, Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations,

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"Take all those things that would propose to be important, and weigh them upon the scale of your soul. Asking how much each thing impacts, not just the moment, but the years ahead. Discard all that is trivial masquerading as significant, and reserve your days for those things that truly matter."

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Foolish reasons deceived our perception of what is important or not. A careful self-deliberation, especially the life-changing decisions, should be executed thoroughly. We should never be hasty, similarly to what Steven Redhead entailed on his book, Life is a Dance,

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"Some rush through life by linking together a constant stream of trivial pursuits."

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The worst case that could happen can be caused by focusing on trivial matters, like what Wilkie Collins stated in his book, The Woman in White,

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"Through all ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together."

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No matter how life is short, how we live only once, and how we should live life to the fullest; we should also consider how significant every second is to be wasted. Living life to the fullest is not doing all the things that you wanted without minding how it would result to. Living life to the fullest is doing all the things that you wanted, knowing how it would impact your life in the present and future, so you will less regrets. Time is gold, so we must utilize it on the significance, not trivialities pretending to be significant. Now, the question that we should carry from time to time is...

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"How significant is this?"