By: Maria Climent Huguet
Maria Climent is a 26-year-old Catalan lady. After studying translation, she decided her life was odd enough to became a humor scriptwriter and by default, a blogger. This is how she’s now a mother of no one and a better person. She also likes to cook!

Many people have thought, “Life’s short”, “Life’s got to be lived” or wondered “What are we living for?” Every person with slight introspective have asked themselves about the purpose of life every now and again.

If, as a consequence of this reflection you have left everything behind to travel the world in search of an answer, you have already found it indeed, or at least one version of it: Yours.

I remember, when these doubts about life started to seriously creep up on me, I mean, the first time I really started to ponder these questions, I was on a holiday trip with my mother. We had rented one of the Budapest apartments to spend some quality time together, as we hadn’t seen each other for a pretty long time. One afternoon she left to take a walk and I stayed at the apartment. Maybe it was because I had spent quite a lot of time with my mother thinking about the life she had lived so far – which of course is not the life she had expected – but to come to the point, once I was left alone, I started to reflect on my life.

I decided I don’t want my life to be boring, sad, monotone or anything of that sort. I know lots of people who work a job they don’t enjoy, wishing for the weekend to come, hating Mondays, hating what they do, which to me is, in essence, hating yourself. And it will always be like that for them, because they don’t change anything. And meanwhile the clock keeps ticking away. I decided I didn’t want my life to be dull and unsuccessful.
When my mother returned I suggested we look for a restaurant with a nice terrace for dinner, I wanted to tell her something really important. That night we had one of those profound conversations with a couple of glasses of wine and a beautiful sunset.

It was right there and then when she told me one thing that probably marked my fate (–the wisdom of a mother, I tell ya!) and will stick with me for the rest of my life: “Whatever you do in life, you’ve got to love it”.

This sentence inevitably took me to the next question:

What do I love? Once you’ve decided what you love, the next step is clear:
Am I good at doing what I love? You probably are. The best football players in the world are football enthusiasts. These two questions are interlocked.
Believe in yourself. Was it Henry Ford, who said “whether you believe you can, or you can’t, you are right”?

I hope this reflection might be helpful to some of you readers who haven’t decided what to do with your life yet. Whether you want to travel forever or get married in your hometown and have as many children as you can. We have to be aware of the fact that life is a gift and we have more control over our own life than we think.
Perhaps some days with your mother in one of the apartments in Budapest help you reflect on this.