Thursday, June 2, 2011

Thought for the day 2nd of June 2011

Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands, which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up?” by Dag Hammarskjold. 

So, what is your life like? Is it really wretched? I think I have repeated the thing a lot of times that things aren’t bad or wretched out of themselves. If you think that it is and something has control of it, it means that you are not in control of your life and anything from outside can control and direct the way you are or the way you feel. Let me remind you what you have probably heard thousands of times: you are in charge of your life and only you allow or prohibit something or somebody to take control of your life.

I like the idea of ‘hands being too small’. It talks about our unwillingness to do things that could bring change into our lives. Yes, various powers want to control your life, but it is you who hand them this control. They cannot take it by force without your permission. I do not mean to say that nothing bad can happen in your life. No! I mean to say that the thing cannot cripple your life and make it wretched if you do not allow it to do so. If some powers of the world start going against you do something to stop them or to use the fact to your advantage. Anything bad can be used for your benefit with the help of your approach to it and your faith that every evil thing can eventually turn to be good. 

The author of the quote also talks about muddled vision. That is another thing that can make our life wretched. If you do not know where you are going or you don’t have a goal in life, the powers I have been talking about will carry you in the direction you don’t want to go. What do you do when your vision becomes muddled or you do not have it at all? Calm down, sit down and start thinking about your desires. What would you want to achieve in life? What kind of work would you want to do? Occasionally it could be good to list things you would not want to do, but try not to concentrate on what you don’t want. Concentrate on what you do want. 

Time will come when you start seeing clearly what you want. Maybe it can take more than a week or a month to figure out what direction you want to take in life, but you will finally arrive at that understanding. Then will come a time to make a plan how you are going to achieve it. Follow the same procedure: calming down, sitting down, thinking about steps which you think would be necessary in order to achieve the vision. The last step that you will have to take is doing what you have planned. That’s it!
So, don’t complain about wretched life. Grow up and change things you want to see different. I hope you will see results pretty fast.  

Read my previous post:

Finding joy