The other day my wife and I had takeout Chinese, which came with the requisite fortune cookies. Neither of us cares for them, so I put them in the compost. But one of the fortunes caught my eye. If you’re the one rowing the boat, you don’t have time to rock it.

How lame, I thought. It isn’t even true in a literal sense. Just stop rowing, and then you can rock the boat all you want. And why would you want to rock the boat anyway? Isn’t that a bad thing?

But my analytical brain wouldn’t leave it alone. Was there a way to make sense of a throwaway saying in a cheap cookie? Well, you know, you twist something around enough, you squeeze stuff out. And here’s what I came up with.

If you spend all your time just getting through life, you have no time to change.

Right? We’re all “rowing” (moving) through life, and at times it can sure feel like hard work to just get by, never mind pursue happiness. But stopping to “rock,” i.e. make life changes, is risky. The boat might swamp, or even sink. Other boats might pass you (gasp). And you might fall out into deep, cold waters, with sharks and such. Safer to just keep rowing along, isn’t it?

Row well. And live.

This all came to mind recently while watching several TEDx talks on believing in yourself and taking advantage of opportunities. Like Choose Yourself by James Altucher, and Go With Your Gut Feeling by Magnus Walker, for instance. Not that I want to be either of these guys, because their interests are different from mine. But they found ways to fulfilling lives by doing more than just rowing with the flow.

And my life has had several points where I chose to rock my boat because I wanted to change and improve. Here are a few:

• Leaving a good job as a software engineer to focus on quality improvement, which led to a challenging and satisfying career change.
• After years of “Maybe later,” I began Aikido training, which I did for over ten years, improving my balance and coordination and learning self-discipline.
• Taking up running in my late forties, which led to my first marathon at 49 and first ultramarathon at 50. I have now run eight marathons and nearly 40 ultras, even winning a 150-mile footrace across the state of Michigan.
• Getting sick of seeing all the trash produced at said races, leading me to start a company to provide Zero Waste at those events.
• I got serious about writing and completed a novel, and am working on another right now. (When I can.)

Granted, nothing world-altering, or any path to untold riches. That’s okay. Never really wanted to go there, except for making the world zero waste, maybe. I’m happy with the choices I made, and how they turned out.

But I feel like it’s time for another boat-rocking session.

I want to really knuckle down and finish this second novel. And write more blog posts. And spread the zero waste gospel more. And make commencement speeches at big universities, because I have so much wisdom to share, you see. 😁 But my life is full, and I’m rowing for all I got. No time to stop and rock – that is, pursue anything bigger, or entirely new.

The good news is I know how to make changes. I’ve done it before, after all. The key is “activation energy,” as Mel Robbins says in her TEDx talk, How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over. The energy to overcome inertia, basically. “It’s simple,” she adds. “Not easy, just simple.” The hard part is deciding what currently fulfilling activities I need to put aside to make my new goals happen. Which ones? Don’t know yet, but I’m feeling the urge. My boat needs rockin’.

For the moment, just writing all this down makes me feel better. And it makes me more determined to actually do something about it, rather than sit here and mope about it.

I’ll keep you all posted. Right here!