Lose Yourself

The philological library at the FU Berlin

Day 11 (Freitag, 26.Sept.08)

I think I found the perfect running song today: Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”. Well, it’s perfect if you want to push yourself so hard you almost drop.

The theme of the song is banal—carpe diem—but the music is so dramatic and the lyrics are so relentless that it really gets one going. And thinking.

For me, spending a year in Berlin will be a unique opportunity. But for what?

The truth is, I have a lot of unique opportunities here. I have the unique opportunity to get beaten up by neo-Nazis on the U-Bahn. I have the unique opportunity to buy currywurst from a street vendor. I have the unique opportunity to sit in my room and listen to Berlin radio all day.

But which opportunities do I seize? Do I seize opportunities that further my own current goals, or do I seize opportunities that are just out there, waiting to be ravished?

I suppose one decent selection criterion is as follows. One asks oneself what one would most regret if one left Berlin without having done it. Well, for me, that’s simple: becoming fluent in German. And second is having done major work on my dissertation. At this point, I think third is seeing the bust of Nefertiti at the Altes Museum. And fourth is seeing as many operas as I can.

But what about those things that I will regret, but that I don’t know about yet? *That* is the real danger, that I will discover unique opportunities that I will regret not having seized, but only when it is too late to do anything about them.

So this time, 11 days into my stay, is probably best used finding new opportunities—ones I never knew existed, but which I will later and for the rest of my life regret not having taken advantage of.