Tag: purpose

  • Are you aware of your legacy?

    Are you aware of your legacy?

    Sometimes, when we’re faced with disappointment about how we’re appreciated by those dear to us, it’s easy to find reason to give up on what we wish to leave as a legacy for them in life.

    So, we withhold our contribution, or pull back on our participation in their lives, assuming that we don’t matter.

    Whether that turns out to be true or not doesn’t mean that we didn’t leave our mark. It just means that the mark we left was not truly a reflection of who we are.

    Giving up on what’s important to you just because it wasn’t as important to someone else means that it wasn’t truly important to you to begin with.

    What was more important to you was the anticipated appreciation or celebration of your contribution, and not the value that you wanted to create for them.

    When we lose sight of this, we also lose ourselves.

    Hope and dreams are most often abandoned because we waited for others to validate what we believed to be valuable in life.

    Regardless of how it plays out, your legacy will either be one of a passionate pursuit of achieving what you believed in, or an abandonment of hope because you were not accepted the way that you wanted to be.

    Either way, you leave a legacy. And if you lose sight of this, you’ll end up blaming the world for what you withheld in your contribution towards it.

    That’s how you feed the very cycles of life that broke your will to pursue your dreams.

    It always starts with you.

    Connect, with conviction, to what you want to add as value to the lives of others, and you’ll find fulfilment in that even if they don’t immediately connect with that value.

    That’s how we have less death bed regrets, and we leave a legacy worth celebrating.

  • Who makes you feel worthy?

    Who makes you feel worthy?

    Confidence comes from caring less about what others think of you, and caring more about what you think of yourself.

    The question is, do you know yourself well enough to have an informed opinion of who you are?

    When we rely on others for more than just feedback and instead allow them to validate who we are, we essentially give them the power to define how we feel about ourselves.

    Listening to what others think of you must be done with one single focus in mind.

    It must be with the objective of determining whether or not the message that you intended was in fact the message that they received.

    But that means that you must know what your message is.

    What is your unique contribution?

    Chances are good that a lot of the good that you do, you simply see it as duty or responsibility.

    And yes, the outcome that we must achieve may be our responsibility or our duty towards others, but how we achieve that outcome and how we make them feel in the process is uniquely us.

    When we lose sight of that, we lose ourselves to duty.

    When we lose ourselves to duty, we feel worthless when our contribution is not appreciated, because our self-worth has grown to be defined by how much others acknowledge and appreciate our efforts towards them.

    That’s when ingratitude for the self kicks in.

    When we diminish who we are because we’re not validated by someone else, we essentially convince ourselves that all the good that we possess is worthless, because it’s not appreciated by one who probably doesn’t appreciate themselves either.

    So. So you know yourself well enough to appreciate who you are? Or is your self-worth nothing more than an affirmation in the mirror?

  • Don’t burn your own hands

    Don’t burn your own hands

    The logic of this is quite obvious, yet we do it, don’t we?

    Sometimes we find it difficult to apologise because we’re afraid that others will think less of us. It feels like a weakness. So we protect ourselves from appearing weak.

    At other times, we find it difficult to apologise because we feel unappreciated. So our offensive behaviour was our way of getting justice for having been treated badly or taken for granted.

    The same reasons that would drive our resistance to admitting fault is what drives others to avoid doing right by us.

    Problems arise when we lose sight of why we expect that much more from them, or worse, why we may be holding them to a standard that is unfair to who they are.

    Sometimes we grow tired of being taken for granted at home, so we lash out at hints of being taken for granted at work. And vice versa.

    Similarly, when our parents may have treated us as insignificant, we end up lashing out at our partners because we fear growing insignificant with them as well.

    That’s how we do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Or why we find it difficult to do the right thing when we know better.

    We complicate life when we lose sight of what we’re dealing with in the moment because we don’t realise that we’re waiting for justice about something that is long gone and forgotten, or unrelated to who we’re with now. .

    Invest in your past, or invest in your present. The choice you make is what determines what you’re investing in your future.

    Emotional mindfulness is key to creating a fulfilled life.

  • Chasing dreams

    Chasing dreams

    Chasing dreams is not all butterflies and roses, or unicorns and rainbows, or whatever.

    Actually, it’s more whatevers than it is anything else because it provokes and inspires changes and new realities in all your comfort spaces.

    But, if you have an endearing relationship with your comfort zones, then chasing dreams is not for you.

    When you chase your dreams, you must be willing to reinvent yourself every step of the way, because what you’re trying to achieve is more than what you have.

    It means that you want to create a version of who you are that will be unfamiliar to those around you, so you risk isolation, being misunderstood, ridiculed, and rejected.

    Chasing dreams means that you’re serving a vision of something you believe to be truly valuable. A vision, not a goal.

    The goals that you define for yourself must be focused on contributing towards that vision.

    Most importantly, it’s your vision. So don’t expect others to believe in it with the same conviction that you do.

    That also means that when others question it, you must recognise that you have more work to do in selling your vision to them. It doesn’t mean that your vision is worthless.

    Chase your dreams. But, before you do, make sure that you own it, or else someone will come along and quite innocently question it, leaving you doubting yourself and potentially abandoning your dream for all the wrong reasons.

    There’s a reason why the majority choose to live by other people’s rules. It’s because they don’t believe in their own dreams, so instead, they dedicate their life enabling the dreams of others.

    There’s no shame in that, provided your doing it consciously, and not out of fear.

    What’s your dream?

  • What is purpose anyway?

    What is purpose anyway?

    While we chase the big question about the purpose of life, we lose sight of the life that we waste daily as we go about serving some purpose or the other without realising it.

    That’s the thing about being distracted from the present moment.

    We’re so concerned about the future, and often still processing the past, that we lose the present.

    Popcorn wisdom aside, we must connect with the reality of what purpose is driving our actions in this very moment.

    However, we often confuse long term goals with purpose.

    Purpose is not something that has a finite end. Nor is it something that is tangible or measurable on its own.

    It’s a higher calling. Something that inspired us to want to achieve goals that serve that purpose, and not a goal in itself.

    There is only ever a single purpose in life, from which all other purposes are spawned.

    That is, the need to be of positive consequence to those around us, and to the world at large.

    We often behave badly when we feel like the fulfilment of that need is under threat. But we’re so focused on complying with expectations, our own and others, that we lose sight of why we feel overwhelmed, taken for granted, abused, or even invisible.

    Reconnect with purpose and life becomes more fulfilling without the conscious effort of making it so.

  • Seize the moment…not the day

    Seize the moment…not the day

    Tomorrow is not just another day.

    Tomorrow is simply today again, only with less time than we had yesterday.

    If you’re not focused on what you need to achieve today, you’ll always be trying to finish what you should’ve done yesterday.

    That’s how procrastination and misplaced optimism wastes away a good life.

    By all means, pace yourself so that you don’t burn out.

    But don’t become complacent in the process.

    Don’t wait for inspiration to strike.

    Inspiration most often hits you in the process of creating something amazing, not in the moments of over thinking what needs to be created.

    Show up.

    Get started.

    Seize the day.

    Tomorrow is never guaranteed.

    Procrastination doesn’t only steal time, it also steals your dreams.

    Embracing your passion in the absence of validation can be quite a powerful source of self-doubt.

    Believe in yourself, otherwise how can you expect others to believe in what you’re creating?

  • A brain dump

    A brain dump

    My inclination to write within the context of a universal experience feels insincere and superficial at times. To want to write at all feels like a self indulgent rant or feathering of my own cap. I’ve abandoned more manuscripts and drafts of old manuscripts these past few weeks than I have all my life.

    The need to recede grows stronger still. My flowery language weighs down in my efforts to express myself lightly. A fresh perspective is elusive in the midst of an old scene. Every effort results only in a new sense of the same old, but no new insights into old demons.

    To be is not as simple as it seems. It demands so much within and without that it commands being, long before it allows me to just be. The shards of madness accumulate as I contemplate the value of it all. Seeing beyond the facade is a painful truth that most would rather disguise. It’s that internalised scene of old demons that prevent new perspectives from shaping. It is the same vantage point that denies affection from those who see our demons as trophies of our humanness.

    The opinions of others have no bearing when we’re convinced that they don’t see what we see. But, even this assumes that our vision is perfect, and our perspectives perfectly informed. Therefore, it must be shame that shades our eyes from the brightness of beauty when the darkness is the only familiarity that we know. Especially when those opinions offer hope when we hope to hold on to the darkness instead.

    The need to expel the clutter from my head is increasing in frequency. Sometimes it’s a healthy release. Sometimes, it creates a shape and form for that which I would rather not have visible. But escapism has never served me well, so brain dumps serve to recalibrate my focus when focus itself appears to be elusive. It’s the counter-intuitive act of being dishevelled in my thoughts in the hope of finding a groomed sanity.

    The four seasons experienced this morning, coupled with tonight’s full moon, resonate with the fluidity of my existence today. Perhaps the tides will bring with it some newfound signs of peace, or serenity. I’m beginning to find a distinct difference between the two.

    One thought that won’t leave me is based on something I wrote in the darkness of late. In contemplating the nature of pain, I stumbled upon the realisation that pain is nothing. It’s nothing where we once had something. It’s the absence of a joy we once had, but has since departed. It, in itself, is not a thing. It is only present in the absence of that which offers us peace…if not serenity. It’s not possible to make sense of nothing. Hence the pain of having nothing after once having had so much.

    Such ramblings continue to tumble out of my mindlessness as I reevaluate everything I once evaluated to be true. There is much that others take for granted but of which I have yet to taste. Giving up on what I need or want has been a constant in my life. But giving up on duty is a luxury that I don’t have. Fixating on what was given up versus what cannot be abandoned has never led to any enlightened spaces. Only self-pity or a toxic sense of entitlement.

    To feel entitled isn’t as vapid as it may appear. Beneath such entitlement still roams the misguided notion that there is a self-worth that must be honoured by others. Whether true or not, social contracts of the like are only as valid as the willing subscription of those party to it. Such subscription has grown to define the value of many, both in its presence by building pedestals for the meek, and in its absence by destroying pedestals of the bold.

    Sanity roams freely in a neighbouring state.

  • Don’t be a martyr

    Don’t be a martyr

    We act out of duty rather than conviction when the guilty martyr in us triumphs over our courage to be true to ourselves, and just to our souls.

    It is our focus on how we wish to be perceived, or how we need to meet expectations, that distracts us from our self-worth and conviction, and redirects us towards compliance aimed at earning inclusion.

    The problem is, when inclusion is claimed at such a price, we inevitably exclude peace and fulfilment from that effort.

    It is that exclusion of peace and fulfilment that leads us to believe that such sacrifices are noble in order to achieve salvation, or validation.

    What we lose sight of is that our unique contribution…our unique beauty that we are able to share with the world is also sacrificed in the process, leaving the world lacking in the very essence of what drives us towards such distractions.

    Choosing your own path does not mean exclusion. It means choosing your rules of engagement with the world around you.

    If everyone conforms to their assumptions of what is expected of them, rather than contributing what they believe to be sincere and true value, who will be the beacons of inspiration for the generations to come when the purpose of such conformance is lost in the rituals that it spawned?