Written by Nick Curtin
Human beings are wired to look at their lives in a narrative format. As a species we even create the structure of a story within our lives by episodic memory recall – looking at events in our past, present, and future with a beginning, middle, and an end. Stories not only provide structure, they add meaning and purpose in our life. Your life, your story, has been working up until this point and whatever you have produced is a direct result of the kind of person you have become, as a result of the choices and consciousness within your story. So you have to ask yourself, are you happy with what your life story has produced?
Many of us live in quiet desperation. We deny our dreams and aspirations out of fear – fear of the unknown, fear of change, and fear of failure. To break out of that fear, you have to break of out yourself. People do not pursue their dreams because on a subconscious level they do not believe they can achieve them, or that they do not deserve them. Paulo Coelo wrote, “…at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.” The only thing controlling your fate is you, no one can take care of your personal details better than you. However, no matter how big your dream, no matter how big your goal – your journey of realizing your dream begins with realizing yourself as seen in the following passage.
There once was a young man that tried to change the world. This proved too difficult, so he tried to change his nation. When he could not change his nation, he focused on changing his town. Since he could not change the town and now older, he tried to change his family. Now a senior, he realizes the only thing he can change is himself. He recognized that if long ago he had changed himself, he would have impacted his family and impacted his town. Their impact could have changed the nation and he could, indeed, have changed the world.
Leo Tolstoy wrote on this very topic that, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Start encouraging and developing yourself: read books, take classes, find a mentor, and begin to invest in yourself. This is the tuition, you have to pay for what you do not know in order to accomplish your goals. Making the decision to pursue your dreams is only the beginning. When you make that decision, you are actually jumping into a swiftly meandering stream of consciousness that will transport you to places never before imagined because as you change within, your perspective changes, and so the world with it.
So, how will the next chapter of your life read?
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