Are You Living or Just Existing?

Michael Atkins
4 min readJun 12, 2021

“Don’t sit at home and wait for the mango tree to bring mangoes to you wherever you are. It won’t happen. If you are truly hungry for change, go out of your comfort zone and change the world.” Israelmore Ayivor

It might have taken you a long time to see beyond your blindness, but now that you can see the truth, why don’t you revel in the experience?

Use your time to truly live!

What does that mean? When you exist, you’re only operating inside of your comfort zone. When you live, you escape from that zone to a vast expanse of possibilities.

When I was an exchange student in Japan back in the late 80s, I thought Japan had a highly rigid educational system. The entire system was designed to instill conformity. Under no circumstances were you ever considered to be unique or capable of greatness. They embraced an entirely different perspective. Good or bad, I’ve always wanted to believe that people have greatness inside of them and that each of us is capable of doing wonderful things.

In Japan, students were constantly being told that they were just average. All they had to do was conform and play the part that society had already reserved for them. Doing wonderful things and changing the world was not considered the “Japanese way.”

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Michael Atkins
Michael Atkins

Written by Michael Atkins

Technologist and life-long language learner. Speaks fluent Japanese and Indonesian among other languages. Inspiring the world through love of language learning

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