“Then I remembered. I remembered watching life from the outside. I remembered wanting to live, but being afraid. It was as if there was a person inside me waiting to be born. He looked like me, but I knew he was very different. He would not be invisible. He would be more than just a watcher. His life would really matter. My soul was experiencing the pain of labor, but I wondered if this person would ever come to life. It was as if I was going crazy. The normal person I had worked so hard to be was being threatened by the person I so desperately longed to be.”
Wake up, Plaat. I’ve been longing for quite some time to make something of myself. It’s been a burning desire and passion of mine to attain success and live a life that really matters. However, I have not been able to even come close to doing this; rather than being met with success, my life has found definition in one failure after another, with the proverbial audience patting me on the back, encouraging me to mark everything off as a “valuable lesson”. Failure is failure. “Don’t call my success a failure because you called your failure a success.”
What is one to do? I’m being driven to the point of desperation as I’d like to finally start waking up and making something of this thing called “life”. What I am finding, however, is that I am a very broken being, incapable of ever attaining the perfection and integrity I strive for, and doubting my ability to ever reach the top of the mountain which I have clung to for several years.
When I returned from New York City, I was told from a business partner of mine that I was the type of person he wanted to be around. He stated “When you are climbing a mountain, you don’t want the person who will stay at base camp, nor the person who will take a few steps and then quit. You want the person who is willing to climb, stick their pick in the ice and hang on for dear life. As I go through life, those are the people I want to have around me.” This was an extreme compliment, as this individual has gone through more hardship than many people I know; he has had to individually dismantle a dream he worked his entire life to build, under circumstances that were far from warranted, with a business that had millions of dollars worth of customers lined up at the door.
It is sad how we can look at somebody like this and feel sorry for their unfortunate circumstances; wishing they would have had better circumstances and the opportunity to succeed with their vision. Were this to happen, we would hate them immensely for being successful and do our best to weasel away every penny from their hard-working hands.
These past few months have been extremely laborious for me, as I’ve begin to rethink and continually reevaluate every aspect of my life. I’ve been learning how to think something over before speaking. It has taught me the true value and cost of running a business or earning a quick buck. Nothing is easy.
What I do know, however, is that my thirst for success and drive for life will one day be quenched, in that my desire and passion for both will continue to grow without any sense of satiation or satisfaction. That, my friend, is living with purpose. I hope there is never a day where I become satisfied with my life, or content to life in lethargy.
In closing, I have really been thinking about how healthy it is to have this level of introspection and self-evaluation. It would be much easier to take life “one day at a time” but I don’t want the easy path. What I can be sure of is that this period of time will certainly yield great fruit. And I believe it to be a pivotal point in my life. LORD, give me strength!
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