Tag: ambition

  • The Lonely Path (II)

    The Lonely Path (II)

    That incomplete thought process is hounding me. It feels as if the main point that I tried to convey in the first take on this subject eluded that entire post. The main point was simply this. Before I continue, I am well aware that me using the term simple when explaining what’s going on in my head is quite the oxymoron. So there is no need to snigger about that.

    Anyway, the point is, when we choose to pursue a greater calling in life that stretches who we are and what we stand for, we need to realise that the people that are familiar with who we are will no longer know the person that we are striving to become. Under ideal circumstances they will grow with us. But ideals are most often talked about and rarely implemented. So expect to feel a creeping sense of isolation when you push yourself beyond the norms that surround you.

    Understand that when you outgrow the environment that you’re in, those that have grown to be defined by that environment will quickly assume that you are trying to be better than them. Or maybe they will assume that you think you are now better than them. Whether that is true is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you are different. You are hopefully a better version of you. But unless you surround yourself with people that appreciate and grow with you, that’s when the lonely path appears before you.

    You’ll find yourself growing uneasy as you feel at odds with what used to be familiar and comforting but slowly grows to feel discomforting and somewhat annoying. The comfort of familiarity will be replaced with the realisation of exclusion. Not the exclusion from social circles because that remains consistent for the most part. But the exclusion that leaves you emotionally wanting while physically accepted. An ambivalence sets in that challenges what you believe to be true against what you think may be an assumption of grandeur.

    Believing that you are capable of more borders precariously between confidence and delusion. Choose delusion, and you’ll be delusioned about your dreams and aspirations, resulting in an embrace of mediocrity so that the familiar comfort of fitting in continues to stroke your ego. Choose confidence and expect to be tested each time you take a bold step towards being the better version of you. Each time you break away from the norm you risk ridicule or rejection, or both. More importantly, each time you step up, you face self-doubt about your ability to succeed, and your motivation to want to succeed.

    Are you still serving that greater purpose or are you serving your ego? Are you pushing yourself to escape complacency or are you courting the admiration of others? The questions that hold you back never cease while the strength to push on is always just out of reach. That’s when you need to stretch yourself into unknown spaces. That’s when doing what feels comfortable and safe threatens to undo every bit of progress that you made up to that point. Even if no one else noticed that progress, you’ll know it was there after you gave it up. Give it up silently and it will haunt you quietly for the rest of your life as you wonder if you would have been able to pull it off. Protect that progress and nurture it into something greater, and you’ll face the reality of success and the horror of failure every few minutes in the back of your mind as you try to focus on what you feel passionate about while trying to subdue the self-doubt that gave you reason to procrastinate for so long.

    At that point you’ll slowly begin to realise that life was never about persevering through trials, it was always about facing the fears of success. By focusing on the trials we have something to raise as a trophy just by surviving. Succeeding in moments that trounced others feels like success, but once the moment passes, once the recognition of our struggles and our bravery fades, we’re back to facing off the same questions that taunted us when we grew restless in the first place when we first looked at our life and saw all the gaps we could fill to make it better and improve it beyond meaningless embellishments. You cannot unsee what you stared in the face. The more you try to ignore it, the more exhausting the effort to distract you from it.

    The lonely path is the only path that showed others that there is a better way. It is the sacrifice of one that improves the lives of many. Needing the guarantee of reciprocation or reward before setting out to improve this world feeds the transactional greed that defines too many of our interactions. Be like everyone else and you’ll always feel like you belong, except when you’re taking your final breath, or when you’ve aged beyond your fickle social needs. When your energy and your health no longer allows you to pursue with gusto the passion of your youth, desiring to change the world will be nothing more than self-inflicted torture. Building hope on the empty promises of inclusion by society is a foolish way to burn your candle. If you hope to die knowing that the world is better because of your existence, don’t shy away from the lonely path, embrace it.

  • The Lonely Path

    The Lonely Path

    There is comfort in being in a space unoccupied by others. The plague of clichés and the clutter of egos take up residence in crowded spaces. Blending into the crowd always threatened my sanity. Living up to an expectation set against a standard that I don’t subscribe to will always result in disappointment for the one that holds such expectation. Sadly, the fulfilment of our expectations defines the sense of significance for too many.

    A simple but defining realisation dawned on me in recent months. There is a conflict of sentiment in encouraging others to own their life. To pursue a path that is unique to what they yearn to see realised in this world places a burden on their shoulders that most are unwilling to bear. It’s much easier to talk about the change that is needed but to recede from the battlefield when the time to act arrives is even easier. Leading the charge against complacency is never a popular role to take.

    Spectators are the armchair critics of life. The back seat drivers, or the wall flowers. They observe the most, analyse the most, criticise the most, and do the least. But their time spent gathering information about everything that is wrong positions them well to be the first to point out the shortcomings of those that choose to go to battle. Through nothing more than the momentum contained in their numbers, they become the opinion makers and the advisors, much like the politicians that send everyone else’s children to fight wars that are created around boardroom tables.

    The odds are stacked against the ones that set out to make things better. Gaining critical mass for positive change amongst a mass of critics is beyond daunting. It requires a healthy dose of tenacity, resilience, and a dollop of manipulation. The populist leader however chooses to have a healthy dose of manipulation and nothing more. Offer incremental change and deliver only a fraction of it, and the history books will celebrate you for generations to come. All you need to do is give people reason to believe that they were part of a movement that made them feel better about not making progress in life, and then release them to go back into the dreary cycle of their lives.

    It’s easy to see why the path of leadership, authentic leadership is a lonely one, especially when you consider that leading does not require a vocal following. It doesn’t even require a conscious one. I once heard that the definition of leadership is to do more than is expected of you. This makes so many sincere contributors leaders despite them feeling like nothing more than burden-bearers.

    Step up to take up the slack of the slackers and automatically you take a lead role. Fill the parenting void of absent parents and you become a role model. Assume responsibility for an outcome that everyone needs but no one wishes to own, and you become a rebel. Speak out loud what you know everyone else is thinking but would never utter from fear of inheriting responsibility, and you become the abrasive protestor. The fly in the ointment, or the pain in the butt. Good intention makes no difference. The moment you choose to improve the quality of your life or the life of those around you, prepare to be judged because in stepping up, we automatically make visible those that are sitting down.

    It’s that easy to start out on the lonely path of leadership. Not pseudo-leadership that needs a title or a declaration to be established. True leadership. The one inspired by the struggle of the common man, or the aspiration of the unknown dreamer. That is the lonely path, because if everyone recognised the importance of the change that is needed, change would not be needed. Natural progression would happen without disruption. The human condition would improve as a natural consequence of commonly-held values that are actually valued. But they don’t value the values that they profess to uphold. Unless they are the designated leader, it’s not their job to care.

    So it rests on the shoulders of the restless ones among us. The ones that see the value of progress and can’t rest until it is realised. The ones that see the gaps and fill it with contributions that uplift the weary souls, or the under resourced. The ones who act, in spite of the critics and the knowledge that they will likely be damned before they are appreciated, let alone celebrated. They are the ones on that lonely path. Despite this, they are also the ones that are most likely to stop and offer a hand to the one whose lethargy finally saw them fall foul of the same system that they once coveted.

    Companionship is rare on this path. By implication of their nature, compensating for the selfish embrace of the other is simply a matter of course. Realising that your restlessness is likely to threaten rather than attract the ones that it is intended to uplift, living a life of restrained expression becomes second nature. The smile that never reaches the eyes, or the embrace that feels comforting but is rarely reciprocated are easily overlooked in the haste that accompanies the indulgence of the distracted.

    [This is an incomplete thought process…]

  • Fleeting Thoughts VIII

    Fleeting Thoughts VIII

    When loyalty triumphs over justice, chaos triumphs over peace.

    Peace is elusive when love for the self is preferred over love for others.

    Love for others reflects a generous spirit, while hatred for others reflects an insecure soul.

    Insecurity is founded in ingratitude.

    Ingratitude breeds insincerity in the same way that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes.

    Stagnation spawns insecurity in the same way that success spawns envy.

    Envy is an attribute of an ungrateful heart, while appreciation is its opposing truth.

    The heart left unrestrained knows no ethics, while the mind disconnected from the heart knows no compassion.

    Compassion is practiced more by the broken than it is by the celebrated.

    Being broken is celebrated by those that lack the courage for accountability.

    Accountability is celebrated in others but spurned by the weak.

    Weakness is only so if after exhausting all avenues and resources, we still cannot prevail.

    The will to prevail is inspired by conviction in the value of the outcome.

    Conviction is impossible without purpose, and purpose is impossible to achieve without taking responsibility for its outcome.

    Responsibility is a burden only for those that don’t recognise the blessing of the capacity to give.

    Giving with the expectation of receiving is not benevolent, it is business.

    The business of transacting with emotional investments rarely yields sustainable returns.

    The best currency for emotional investments is the act of paying it forward.

    Paying it forward yields no personal returns if you are at the origin of that payment cycle.

    Emotional investment cycles are self sustaining only if everyone involved subscribes to the same values.

    Value is found in gratitude more than it is found in wallets.

    Wealth holds no peace or comfort if not spent in the upliftment of others.

    Upliftment of others is only possible by one who appreciates their blessings.

    Appreciation for what you have offers more contentment than meditation or solitude ever will.

    Solitude is sought by those disillusioned with the world.

    Disillusionment dictates that all hope must be subdued.

    Hope is fleeting when futility is courted.

    Courting futility is a safe way to avoid ambition.

    Ambition is lacking in one who sees no future.

    Giving up on the future is only possible when we focus on disappointments and dismiss any reality that opposes it.

    Dismissing the good because of the absence of a desired outcome reveals ingratitude more than it does disappointment.

    Disappointment is tempered by gratitude, and gratitude is sustained by hope.

    Expectations is the nemesis of hope because hope disarms entitlement.

    Entitlement is the currency of an ungrateful soul.

  • Finding My Way

    I have a lot that I want to pursue, explore, or share in my efforts to unravel or unpack the unanswered questions around me. I think sometimes that I should in fact write that book that many friends, colleagues, and some professional acquaintances often nagged me about, but then I wonder if there is anything new that I can add to the already burgeoning stores of narratives that someone thought was special enough to share. One of the problems with this ease of accessibility to sharing your thoughts is that everything fast becomes clichéd because everyone has a pearl of wisdom to drop all over the place. I wonder then if the new challenge is not to string together meaningful fresh insights, but rather to collate the clichés in a way that brings sanity to the noise, or beauty to the jagged edges of everyone’s desire to be noticed?

    My life is less than ordinary. It always has been. I always imagined ordinary to be a normal home, with a normal family, normal parents, with general growing pains and the usual social circles to round it all up. Children that have a healthy dose of sibling rivalry, but a healthier dose of family unity. Parents that each play their own parts equitably so that a vague sense of order and balance resonates through the home. Overall, there’s a general sense of wholesomeness accompanied by an unashamed sense of mediocrity in celebrating the little life stages that each of the kids make it through, while the parents grow content with having put their kids through school, and then maybe college or university, followed by marrying them off into good families to start that entire cycle again.

    That’s not my life. Never has been. Improving on that would be extraordinary, but less than that must then be less than ordinary. That would be my life. Less ordinary, and somewhat weird. Part of the weirdness was instilled at an early age when I realised that I was not like my siblings, so seeking affirmation from them for what interested me was never an option. My parents had their own distractions, so seeking out fatherly guidance was not an option either. And so started the troubled journey of finding my own way in life.

    There’s a boon that accompanies such a journey, and that is the ability to forge new paths and take the less travelled roads (oh, those damned clichés ). The opportunity to make your own mistakes without having someone around to tell you ‘I told you so’, nor having someone around to constrain your thinking or creativity in line with their fears, or failures. But there’s a burden that accompanies every boon. That burden is the anguish you feel when you’re embarking on something really important, or at least want to, and there’s a room full of no one that you’re able to use as a sounding board. No one that you feel comfortable enough to share that passion with because you know that your reality is very different from theirs. Your frame of reference is different from theirs. Your self-imposed limitations, your fears, your desires, your perspective, is all different. So seeking sanity in their reflections is a futile exercise.

    At points like these I wonder if this is what it may feel like, in some small way, to be an orphan. To be without guides, or mentors, or pillars of strength. To instead find yourself to be that pillar of strength, that guide, and that mentor for others, with the means to guide you being not much more than a quirky ability to reflect while indulging, or to observe while acting, coupled with a resilience that can’t be explained. There’s a stubborn obstinacy within me that refuses to give way to convention. When I do fight that stubbornness in an attempt to ‘get along’, I find my health suffering because of the unnatural tension that it causes within me.

    The likely delusion in all this is that I seem to think that my circumstance is special. This world appears to be more dysfunctional than wholesome. Our drive for individual instant gratification has already eroded the sense of community that we all long for, but towards which most are not willing to contribute. This is sounding more like a brain dump than a post. Perhaps in that lies the secret of finding my way. Rather than internalising, perhaps there is much to be gained from verbalising my clutter, because once it’s out there in plain language, the sense or stupidity of it all becomes blatantly obvious, making it possible to sift through the muck so that I can find the gems that would lead me on to the next leg of my journey.