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Chronicles pre-Erasmus: how you could feel

When you apply for an Erasmus program, the very first period is so exciting because you start dreaming about all the possible destinations, how they look like, the people you could meet, the experiences you could live…

Everything sounds like a choir of angels at the doors of paradise.

Till when the inevitable day comes. Your gut wrenching, your forehead cold sweating, your hands trembling. The list with the assigned destinations is out. After taking the courage to check which is yours, you need to do just one more thing to make it official: to press that button which says “I accept”.

This is when the choir of angels becomes a group of boorish demons. Your worst fears come out and  you realized how necessary is to have a strong reason why (click to read the previous post about this issue).

Suddenly all your determination falls down and leaves the space to scary thoughts. “What if…” - this is the typical starting point that compels us to make a few steps back.

In just one moment, the point of view, initially so colourful and positive, becomes completely the opposite. You figure yourself without a home, with no friends, not passing your exams (maybe a bit extreme? Yeah, but… you got my point haha).

Is this the right choice?

You’re leaving your stability, your family, your routine, all what you know so perfectly, to throw yourself in the uncertainty of the indefinite.

We may often claim about what is not going right in our lives, but most of the time we don’t do absolutely anything in order to make things change.
We don’t act, because, sometimes, those perks are not worth the effort to put oneself out of the comfort zone. We prefer to keep them, as well with the complaints, just to be at least reassured by the fact that the environment that surrounds us is something familiar.

Familiar means safe and it is very difficult to leave, especially in our society, where we are not used at all to fight for what we want, since we’ve almost everything at hand. This is actually a pity because the richness of our times is not an advantage, as we could think, but the opposite.

It could happen as well that just the pure potential is enough to satisfy ourselves, so we could end up meditating about all the different options without choosing any of them, eventually. Choosing makes us afraid, of course! It means to take just one path, giving up on all the others, which, since we haven’t experienced them yet, could be better than the one we actually enter.

In this sense I consider extremely powerful a quote from a Danish philosopher:

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!” - Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

This could explain as well why we are crazy about money. They are the possibility that becomes materiality. With a coin we can buy so many different things, which makes us feel powerful. We could have everything, even though, at the same time, we own nothing.

Don’t be too worried of what could happen next and at the same time don’t be satisfied of what could be. Press that damn button! To know you had the chance to go somewhere, to visit beautiful places and to live thrilling adventures is not enough. Make it all happen and believe in yourself and in your abilities!