November 26, 2007
3:44 PM
What is life anyway?
For most of us, life is getting up in the mornings, grabbing a cup of coffee, maybe some quick breakfast if we have time, and trying to beat the early morning rush on our way to work. In the evening, on our way back from work, we stress over the traffic jams to get home for the children, evening meals, homework, baths and bed, and exhausted we fall asleep while watching television.
We do this routinely, on an average of five days a week, for a two day break on week-ends, for earned income that barely pays the bills. We live on borrowed money, credit cards, lines of credit, twenty-five year mortgages, and when vacation time comes around, we’re lucky if we get two to three weeks in a row to rest and recuperate, again on borrowed money. Is this what life is about? Was life meant to be such a struggle?
Og Mandino put it this way, “We all start out on this uncertain road of life, with a dream, an ambition, a goal. A fortunate few manage to survive all the hazards, the road blocks and pot holes along the way to reach their objective.
Most of us, however, get sidetracked on our journey and stumble through our allotted years with our hopes and dreams fading from memory.”
“What happened to the grand dreams of our youth? Suicide. Struck down by our own caution, our fears, our lack of faith in ourselves, and our abilities.”
“Opportunities, there were many. But always there was risk. Do we dare? We waver. Time hurries by. Opportunity gone. We anguish. The years roll on. Finally we convince ourselves that it’s too late and settle for cheap imitations of life. We envy the achievers. How lucky they are. Only our pillow knows the truth.”
“So many of us awake each morning with dread in our hearts. To face the monotony of another day with its ceaseless toil and pressures for so little reward. We bathe, and put on our costume, and reluctantly force ourselves to crawl from our cocoon to confront a world we imagine is ready to devour us. Each day repeats the drudgery of the last, except that the hours seem to growpainfully longer as the years pass by. The body is weary. The mind is numb. The obligations increase. The future is dim. Finally the day ends. Oblivion. And then the sun rises again.”
“So many of us count the hours of our work as slavery. We limp through each day as if there were irons on our legs, our hands reluctantly on the task at hand, our eyes always on the clock. We flinch at the voice of authority, despising the power that decrees how we should act.”
This Is The Fate of Millions of People.
I Suggest That You Don’t Let It Be Yours!
I remember many a time folks telling me that, “life was what you make of it”. I never really understood the full meaning of this phrase probably because, most people who quoted that phrase didn’t understand it themselves.
Most people’s interpretation then and still now, was basically to accept life for what it is and to be happy with what you have. How can you ever hope to be happy struggling everyday to make ends meet.
Above all, the paraphrase that I’ve always despised the most was “you can’t buy happiness” This is true, but only to some degree. Whoever stated this, was never rich to begin with. Ask the person who eats Kraft dinners routinely, if he’d be much happier eating a well balanced meal.
Lets face it, nobody ever living on the poverty line or getting by on a mediocre income is truly happy. If he or she are telling you they are, they are lying to themselves. Life with money is a lot easier than life without. Everybody knows that, and denying it is only fooling oneself. You cannot be happy about slaving and wasting your precious life away to make someone else’s dreams come true. We do it because we don’t constantly dwell on it, but maybe we should.
Most people want to be happy in life, but the problem is, that most people don’t know what they’re looking for. So inevitably, they die without ever having found it. How sad. When you don’t know where your going, how can you ever hope to get there. You obviously and generally get nowhere.
The same holds true when you don’t know what you want out of life,you generally get nothing. It is said, that those who never do what they really enjoy doing, belong to the living dead.
If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, as the song says “to live like you were dying”, wouldn’t you change your plans for today? Wouldn’t you be doing something else with your life rather than what you’ve been doing up to now? Then why should it be different if your not dying. The answer to that is lack of financial resources, lack of money.
How did we become so complacent, so indifferent, so accepting. How did we let ourselves get caught up on this wheel of misfortune, and despair. Did we forget those exciting dreams? After all, a dream is just a thought, and thoughts come and go.
People, mostly family, thought of me as a big dreamer, and by their thoughts alone, told me how limited their vision was. To them, and all of you out there, I say this;
“ Dreams, just like Spring, are one day born. They are inspired by a word, a song, an image, an idea, an absurd feeling that fills us with hope and excitement.
Where dreams are born, is not important. What’s important is, that they become part of us, set deep in our thoughts and in our hearts, dictating a path that we should take and follow through, if we are to be happy in life. Even God dreamed, and then he created the world.
Dreams need us as much as we need them. That is why, naturally, we covet them and nurture them. We help them take form and grow. We slowly put them to the test and they become strong. We begin to give them permanent residency in our everyday lives. We sleep with them, caress them on rainy days.
But at times we mistreat them, don’t we. We shelve them, just for a short time we assure ourselves. But we all know that time can be treacherous. Or, we simply sweep them under the carpet on a day of desperation and discouragement, and tell ourselves, “who cares, it wouldn’t of worked anyway.” Sound familiar?. It does to me.
We can waste them, deny them, do them wrong, or simply abandon them, but we can never forget them. Just like a new day in Spring, or a first found love, there are things that haunt us forever. Most dictionaries will tell you that dreams come and go, but they never tell you that you can live your dreams.
Therefore, in trying to determine what it is you want out of life, don’t you think that you should follow your dreams? Don’t your dreams dictate the path that you must follow if you’re ever to be fulfilled and happy. Irrelevant of money, isn’t this an important factor in determining, where it is you want to go in life?
The key, is first to accept that there are secrets to success, to understand how and why they work, and then to put them into practice in our everyday lives, because financial prosperity, or just plain having a lot of money, which allows us to fulfill our dreams, are goals we can all achieve if we understand and practice these simple rules.
It is not hard work that makes people rich, as I am sure you’ve found this out. Someone who earns 250,000$ a year does not work any more hours then you do. So, if we all have the same number of hours in a week, and a person earns 10 times more than you do, without working any more hours, then he must have a secret that you don’t know about.
It is crucial that you understand this, because if you do, then your ahead of most people, because most people are to busy earning a living to take the time and think about how they could get rid of their money problems.
Thus, for all the times you were told that life is what you make of it, never fully understanding the implications of that statement, sometimes leaving you confused, the truth behind it is, “you are where you are in life, because of what you are,” however offensive this may sound.
That life gives you exactly what you ask of it, because life is an exact mirror of your thoughts. If you will allow yourself to grasp and accept these two simple truths while looking at yourself in the mirror, then to change your destiny, you must first change the way you think. Only by changing the way you think, will you ever change your life.
Each day do something good for yourself. It can be something small, such buying a book, eating something you love, watching you favorite program on TV, going to a movie, or just having a stroll on the beach.