diamonds are forever ....
We were talking last night. Through sms. She said, “With an unbalanced girl like me, you have to have a balanced approach.”
I retorted. The revolt-quotient in me reached a high note.
“It’s not like that. You do have a balance. You think you are coal. Daily. Boring. Run-of-the-mill. You know what? You are a piece of diamond. Hard-to-find. Wait till the day you realize this.”
She replied fast. Evidently canceling me out.
“I do not want to be a diamond. I am happy to be an ordinary girl with ordinary dreams. I am happy to be the coal.”
Now 2 roads came up at this point.
One asked me whether it is complacency to limit oneself to coal and not excel towards being a diamond. Or is it plain mediocrity?
Second brought back a memory of an article. Paulo Coelho writes about 4 obstacles. Obstacles that talk exactly about such inhibitions that hold us back from realizing our dreams. Chains that bind us. Keep us happy in our coal-state. Stops us from achieving the diamond-state.
And while my eyes go back to the line “I do not want to be a diamond”, my mind wonders what all stops a person from achieving what she/he aspires for.
Paulo Coelho quantifies the reasons.
We take the 2nd road.
There are 4 obstacles.
First, we are told from childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it’s still there.
If we have the courage to disinter our dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: LOVE. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us going forward, and that those who genuinely wish us well, want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.
Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle: FEAR OF THE DEFEATS we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn’t work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse – “Oh well, I didn’t really want it anyway.” We do want it and know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this journey. Then we, warriors of light, must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how.
Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the 4th obstacle: THE FEAR OF REALIZING THE DREAM for which we have been fighting all our lives.
Oscar Wilde said, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” And it’s true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the sufferings we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people, who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal when it was only a step away.
What Paulo Coelho writes is a truth we all have faced this far. Life has admonished us about not personally enhancing ourselves, at this point or that. Some of us have listened and moved up the state. Some of us are in progress. It’s the third category that is still holding on to the railing of coal-state, with a dead-man’s hold.
Like my friend on the other side of the phone.
We need a Push-and-Pull at this moment – while these people give themselves a pull to enhance themselves from the core, we should collectively encourage them, give them a push to change their current placid state-of-being.
3 cheers to the effort!!
Acknowledgements -- Paulho Coelho's writing has been taken from the preface of "The Alchemist".
Image courtesy : http://stanleybronstein.com/blog/roadblock.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment