God Within

One trait that separates human beings from animals is enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek root which literally translates into 'God within'. Oxford mentions the literal meaning in word origin as 'possessed by a god, inspired.' So, an enthusiastic person has God within him. It is like a volcano, always simmering, waiting to burst & it is entirely for this reason that an enthusiastic person is never indecisive. He is always dying to take new decisions, new risks in life. The problem begins when we encounter occasional failure. Energy level dips & indecision takes place. The only way we can remove the curse of indecision is to have the blessing of enthusiasm. Like a volcano never allows the grass to grow on its peak, enthusiasm doesn't allow a person to be indecisive. 

You Only Live Once

The tragedy of life is not that we get only one life to live but that we don't know how to live that one life. For the purpose of understanding, we can divide the purpose of our life into three sections- learning, earning & yearning. If we understand these three, and try to live accordingly, one life is more than enough. 

The first step is learning; but the big question is what & how to learn. We learn what we are taught-by our parents,our peer group, our teachers & by other varied sources. Initially, we adopt this learning only as idea but when we are taught the same thing again & again & we don't question these ideas, they are converted into beliefs. And once they are converted into beliefs, they are difficult to remove. So, if we are taught a particular religion, we accept it & by & by it becomes an integral part of our existence. But if we are also taught that our religion is the best one & all other religions are sham, we would accept this too as a belief & would start practicing the same. The vital aspect of any learning is questioning, reasoning & then establishing your own beliefs. If we are taught to question our set beliefs & find the answers ourselves we would have learned in every sense of the word.

The second step of living truly is earning & we are not good at that. We learn what to earn from our needs. A child wants to earn knowledge, love, compassion & freedom. But as we grow up, we learn to earn everything that fulfills our basic needs & then earn to become financially independent. But our wants don't stop there; we crave for more- if I have a house, I need a bigger one & if I get that, I need one more & won't mind if it keeps adding. Same thinking goes for our car, for bank balance & for other materialistic pursuits. And this greed engulfs us so much that we forget we are buying these at the cost of living. Richard Bach expressed it succinctly when he said, 

                       "Shop for security over happiness, and you buy it at that price."

Earn financial independence but never at the cost of happiness, love & compassion for self & for all the people connected to you.

The third aspect is yearning; yearning for a quality life, for a peaceful coexistence, for living every moment of this life. But ironically, either we desire for the life we have lived or for another life, forgetting that while we were wishing so, another moment of this 'only one life' flitted by. We would live truly if we learn to live in 'now' not in 'years', to count moments not months.

" Butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough." 

                                                                          - Rabindra Nath Tagore. 

Truer Than True

We spend major part of our life competing with others, being one-up with our fellow human beings & doing things to impress everyone. While the reality is that no one is more important than you. We live a life driven by external sources & ignore the one who holds the key to a contented life. We want a plush job, a palatial home, an extravagant lifestyle not to impress ourselves but to seek attention of others. While doing so we forget that we pay a heavy price for something that we don't need. We buy luxury at the cost of happiness, promotion at the cost of relationship & wealth at the cost of peace of mind.
We come to this world all alone but find a lot of people around us fighting among them to be the best. And we try to find the meaning of being the best but realize there is no scale to measure the best of anything. We get more confuse & struggle for answers. But when we don't get the answer, we too get involved in this rat-race. We keep running our whole life & many a time lead the race as well but we find out after many years of running that this race was not needed & will never end. We try to get out of the race but get pushed in by someone or the other & start running again. We don't stop for fear that we may be left behind or get trampled by someone. And one day we drop dead !
If only you had realized that there is no one outside you. You begin with yourself & end there. You are the world & the whole world is within you. The rest is only a mirage. The only truth is that nothing is truer than you. Competing with others is like fighting with the self & feeling a winner & a loser at the same time. All things are relevant in relation to you and not the other way round. 
We exist not to push or impress others or to compete with them, but to help & love them. The sense of competition brings negative energy while sense of togetherness attracts positive vibes. We don't become an island or limit ourselves by thinking about self. On the contrary, we expand much more. We break boundaries & connect to more people than we do when we compete with others.
You have not come here to be like someone or to be better than others. If we try to do so we go against the design of God who didn't want us all to be the same but different in all aspects.
     "The only person you should try to be better than is the person you were yesterday."
                                                                                                                -Anonymous 

Give And Give

Most of the successful people are successful because of their unmatched intelligence. They are different because they think differently. Their actions defy all logic and they are ridiculed and revered because of the their out-of-the-box ideas. They have one more quality that helps them reach the pinnacle of success & it is that they all have a big heart. Their prime goal is not to be successful but to make others happy by elevating their life. They relentlessly work for the betterment of human race till their end.
Being genius is a gift of God but being generous is your return gift to God. We all are gifted in certain ways so that we shower gifts given to us by God on people who are not so gifted in that field. But instead of cooperating, we start competing. We start thinking that if we share our traits with others he might become more successful than us. This limited thinking stops us from sharing our genius with our fellow human beings & we die with that unused talent. You might have used that talent but if a vast population remains devoid of something that they would have got with little generosity, I would call it unused genius.
In fact, we are only an agent between God & other people as far as passing these gifts are concerned. Our job is not to think what will happen to our gifts but to do what we have been assigned to do. Another important point to remember is that it is an unending supply. The more you give, the more gifts will be supplied to you. If you stop the supply, further supply of gifts to you will also be stopped. 'Give & Receive' is an old principle. The new principle is 'Give & Give'. 

Dance Of Your Life

Imagine a football ground sized auditorium packed to its capacity; spectators are waiting for a much talked about dance performance with bated breath. There is nothing happening on the stage for quite some time. And when the curtains are lifted, they notice a figure limping its way to the center-stage. The child they see is nicely dressed but hardly noticeable & low in confidence. He stands there for a while with tears in his eyes and then murmur something which is barely audible to the audience. They feel pity on the child and start leaving the auditorium one by one. The child also leaves the stage after the hall has emptied. 

This is not the scene from a play or a movie. This is what happens in the lives of a large number of people. When we come to this world, our arrival is welcomed. Each one of us is expected to be a hero & we too are brimming with joy & enthusiasm. But when we see people around us who are struggling to succeed, hardly making both ends meet, whimpering & doing their daily chores grudgingly, we start thinking that the life is not to be celebrated but to be mourned. We start making all kinds of compromises; start complaining about everything & expressing our anger on this drama called life. And one day we become exactly like the child narrated above. Who is to blame for this sorry state of our life ? 

I know you know the answer ! But, why do we allow our life to drift in this direction when we know that we come to this world to dance, to celebrate, not to struggle or to get enslaved to a routine? In fact, each day is a huge opportunity to kick off your shoes and rock the stage. Don't bother if you don't know the steps. As Wayne Dyer succinctly explains, "When you dance your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It's to enjoy each step on the way." Understand the purpose of your life- It's to dance, to enjoy; not to get into a particular pattern. And as you live your life, the patterns will be set as per your choice. 

Now imagine the same boy on the stage giving the best performance of his life because he is happy & enjoying each step; and on the way enthralling the audience & spreading joy all around. He is having the dance of his life! 

Fear Vs Faith

There are two dominant forces working in this world- Fear & Faith. And both the forces can't co-exist. In fact, they antagonize each other. When someone gets bitten by the fear bug, the first symptom that shows up is loss of faith. The other symptoms may be poor self-esteem, frustration, low confidence & feeling of guilt. Ultimately, the person cuts himself from  the world & becomes a recluse. Fear engulfs his whole mental make-up & he goes into depression.

On the other hand, the person who has faith in self & God can move mountains. He does the impossible because he believes it before he sees it happening. As William Wordsworth stated, 
                                                  "Faith is a passionate intuition." 
The person who has faith has the intuition of things coming his way & he does not see a blurred image but a very clear vision. He achieves everything twice- first in his mind & then in the real world. Once he starts experiencing the magic of belief, all impossible looking things look very much possible. He sees fear in the face & challenges all his limits. Now, he does not enjoy achieving easy goals. He leaves these for the fickle-minded & relishes only the impossible looking goals. 

But the important thing is to cross the first hurdle of fear- fear of failure. One reason that many people lead an ordinary existence is that they are in the grip of this fear. They don't realize that the success lies on the other side of this fear. The moment they challenge the fear, it vanishes into thin air. Fear is like a street dog. It chases you till you run away from it but crawls back once you stand & look straight into its eye. 

The only way to shoo away this fear is to run towards it. You will gather courage, gain confidence & do the things which earlier seemed impossible. All the successful people had one trait common in them- they feared nothing & it was because they had immense faith in their abilities. You might have come across people who looked quite ordinary when you last saw them but they shocked you with their achievements when you met them after few years. There was nothing miraculous that happened in their life; they only shifted from fear mode to faith mode & because you did not see the shift, you were shocked with their achievements. Now it is your turn to shock the world. 

Learning Is An Art

Learning is not a science; it's an art. This is why it cannot be taught; it has to be learnt. Our learning comes much before we physically appear in this world. A child learns to survive in the womb of his mother. He survives many odds & ultimately arrives. In fact he survives in much tougher condition than a normal child would do in physical world. And when he arrives we wind a protective cover around him. The child acclimatizes himself quite fast in the new atmosphere. Most of the things he learns himself through trial & error method. He makes mistakes, learns & grows up.
He also learns a lot many things from his parents, peer group & teachers. But when he grows up, he hates being told. Not that he doesn't understand what we tell him but he finds the style quite didactic. And it is because he is a good observer too. He finds a lot of people around him telling a lot of things and practicing just the opposite. He is not confused; he is convinced- convinced that all the people who  are  trying to teach him are themselves confused.
So the best way to teach a child is to be like him. Don't teach him to be a perfect man. Teach him to be a perfect child. Throw challenges at him or throw him to challenges. Let him commit mistakes & learn through these. The more mistakes he commits, the more mature a person he becomes. Trust him; if he could survive those difficult months before you saw him in physical form, he will survive the rest of his life as well.
Ironically, most of the children become the same kinds of fathers that they don't want in their childhood. And the reason is not that he is forced to believe by being told some moral precepts but because he observes that behavior, day in & day out. He thinks it cool to oppose something in childhood and follow the same when he becomes a father. And he believes that this is the only way to be a nice father & the fallacy continues. 
If  we teach him to be a free man independent of the opinions of others, he would walk the right path. If he doesn't know the way, he will find out one!