Don't Take Life So Seriously

Great learnings and thoughts can arrive anytime and usually when we least expect them. One such experience happened with me yesterday (26th August 2020) during DebConf20.

I was directing a talk yesterday. In direction, my role was to choose what goes on DebConf20 live stream worldwide. During a transition, I messed up by choosing a wrong display which played on stream for more than a minute. This was only rectified when the talk meister pointed that out to me. After the talk ended, the speaker thanked us (talk meister and me) to which I apologized for messing up during his talk to which he casually said, on the lines that “don’t take life so seriously”. This had my mind blown. Due to the mess up, I was planning to drop from directing two other talks that I had later that day I was stressed and was getting anxious. These simple words were like enlightenment and soothed me. But after listening to the words, I dropped the idea of dropping ;).

I know, I’ll mess up things in life but, I will continue doing what I enjoy and took the responsibility for. Many a time, we take life too seriously. Things tend to go haywire, mistakes happen but that doesn’t mean we have to keep stressing out about it. They were experiences and happenings in our journey called life. Moving on is the key forward. Let’s consider maybe our stresses are own creations.

The following quote does a fairly good job describing life:

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot. ― Charlie Chaplin

And finally, Thank you, Florian Haftmann, speaker for talk, “POSIX pitfalls in modern desktop environments and how to work-around them” in DebConf20 for this lesson. I am genuinely indebted to you.