The unexamined life is not worth living.——Socrates
Socrates’s words impressed me with its insight on life. Personally, completely I am cohesive with his words, as they encourage us to examine our life, an overriding ability to us.
Examining life can be a good friend to help us get through difficulties, such as a course of feeling bored to do anything, which illustrates the importance of it.
BUT HOW TO EXAMINE OUR LIFE?
The first step to examine our life is to think about it!
We must ask ourselves the following questions (a little philosophical it seems):
Who am I?
What do I have now? (good or bad things)
Who I want to be?
In a word, we must figure out what our life is, but it can be confounding!
Let me start the first step. I am Pete, a student majoring translation and interpreting. I am in poor health and find no motivations to study. Meanwhile, I fortunately possess many peerless classmates who are all very diligent. And surely I want to make some academic achievements and become more professional in two years. But I also find that I am in a plight where I do want to put my dreams into reality while just finding my keeping complaining and refusing to change anything.
Apparently, thinking is far away from examining life, here hence comes the second step— to do it.
We can divide our goals into several practical and specific missions and then just do it.
I will take my two main troubles, poor health and unmotivated to study, as examples.
Often health has a bearing on life-style and mine can be recouped by embracing a regular life. With this intention, sleeping and getting up is the vitally important mission that I must do first (I divided the ultimate goal—living a healthy life into two missions). Then I forced myself to sleep and get up earlier one hour everyday than before in this semester (I just did it), gradually ending up with moving toward to a healthier life.
Also feeling unmotivated to study has been solved by doing so: Every evening I listed on my notebook what I should do the following day and did them one by one and day by day, an endeavor to rid me from being torpid and somber. Suffice to say, changing is not a one-shot deal but takes efforts and patience.
The reason why an unexamined life is not worth living lies on the fact that we will neither have idea about our life at all without thinking, nor have incentives to change it without taking actions. Can you imagine such life is worth living？
Remember, my dear readers, examining our life is much better than lying on the bed, daydreaming or complaining everything. And please take actions if you are curious about the fruits of doing it, as humans are encouraged to experience and change.
刘平平 于云南大学
