It was one of the first lessons I had taken on. A very small classroom, barely large enough for five or six students. As I walked in, I started thinking, as usual:
What could go wrong today?
In reality, nothing happened. Everything went smoothly during the lesson. A few yawns, a few interruptions, nothing serious, you know.
But at the end of the lesson, just as I was about to get into my car and drive home, I started having those endless thoughts.
Was all this really right for me? Was I happy?
For quite some time, I had doubts about whether I had made the right choice by becoming a teacher. I think I was mistaken either way. As it turned out, the problem wasn’t the profession. In fact, it was quite the opposite: it fulfilled me. My contact with the students, the conversations about their future, teaching, the difficult questions they asked, all of that.
The question I should probably have been asking was:
How did I get here in the first place? Was it a conscious choice?
After graduating from the Physics Department, most of my fellow students followed the path of education, and so did I. At that moment, it seemed like the most natural thing to do. When you add to that all the stories I had heard since I was a child about having a permanent job, making a living, and so on, it reinforced the idea even more in my mind.
As I was probably sinking deeper into my thoughts, like another shipwreck survivor on a rotten raft, my mind went back to the past. There, I remembered a story from the first few months of my life as a student.
Being away from my parents and everything familiar, I wanted (or so I thought at the time) to rewrite myself from the beginning. So I decided that I would go to an online bookstore, order some books, and start reading.
Like some great “expert,” I obviously chose books at random. And, of course, I bought whatever was on sale, because no money. In the end, I ordered thirty books: Voltaire, Aeschylus, Carnegie, Greene, some terrible self-help books, bad translations, and so on.
A few days later, when I went to the bookstore to pick them up, the following exchange took place:
“Oh, so you’re the one with the thirty books. Are you opening a bookstore? What are we supposed to do?”
I burst out laughing and lowered my head, not knowing whether the person was mocking me, being ironic, or simply joking. In the end, I took the books home.
Looking at all those books, I realized that I genuinely hadn’t read anything particularly significant until then. Apart from the required books at school for literature class, nothing else. Oh, and White Fang by Jack London, if I remember correctly.
So I thought I would start with the shorter books, so that the poor thing wouldn’t get discouraged {that poor thing being me}.
One book led to another, until I reached what seemed like a giant to me: The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene.
I got completely lost in it. I read it as if there were no tomorrow. There was so much information that this was when I first started taking notes on the book, in notebooks, everywhere.
Obviously, none of those books had anything to do with Physics, because I have always been (and still am) that way. Like the raft I mentioned earlier, I simply drifted along and went wherever the current took me.
Then, after about four days of devouring that particular book, I reached the end. There it was: BIBLIOGRAPHY. A miracle and a disaster for my wallet.
“There’s the next list,” I remember saying. And that was where my reminiscing ended.
What I understand now is this: at that moment, I had chosen what I wanted to learn. Whether I was right or wrong, nobody had any expectations of me - no performance requirements, no grades, nothing.
For the first time, reading was something deeply personal.
Of course, I finished my Physics degree and became a teacher, as I said. Everything was as it was supposed to be. I took all the right steps that someone would have expected me to take.
But deep down, I knew that I wanted something else too. Perhaps that is a story for another time.
For many years, I believed that fear was what stopped people from making changes in their lives. Now, if you ask me, I believe it is familiarity.
If you think about it, it doesn’t even feel like a choice. It feels like a fact, like something that is the way it is simply because it has always been that way. You never question it.
You say, for example, “I’ll do it, sure, but I’ll do it later. When I have money, when I have time, when…”
Let’s admit it, though:
we don’t do it, because the path we are on seems easy and safe.
I no longer believe that major decisions are made at the moment we think about them. I believe something else happens. They take shape inside us before we realize it, with our choices, our actions, and our thoughts. With the books we read, the films we reject or choose - in everything.
For me, for example, the best decision was when my wife and I decided to move to another city without having a reason, a job, or anything else. We simply decided to do it, and we went.
We trusted ourselves and moved forward. Nothing more.
I am now finishing my second year here, and everything is going well. Better than ever, I would say.
And I think about this: the future in general begins to feel safer when you start trusting yourself—and the person you will become in the future.
If I had to give one piece of advice, mainly to myself, it would be this:
Trust yourself—not because you will always do the right thing; you will make many mistakes. But with every choice, you will learn more about yourself.
And returning once again to that doubt I felt after the lesson, sitting in the car, I think that perhaps, at that particular moment, what I was missing was certainty.
But that was not what I truly wanted. I wanted my life to belong to me. My choices, my actions—everything.
Sooner or later, that is what happens.
Perhaps that is the moment when life truly becomes our own.
Continue the Journey
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