Everybody is teaching you how to be happy in one way or another...that seems to be the lesson most people care about, whether it be Reader's Digest or the religious mystics. The editorial team, the researchers, the scholars, some are happy themselves some are not...
I keep trying to learn rules and principles which will keep me happy; rules that can always be replaced for better ones...another such rule that I think will help in my journey to ITHACA to fight the Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,the angry Poseidonis (click on here to read about my post on ITHACA), this, a lesson I have picked up: the realisation that people who want to grow like me can go about it in two ways. These I describe as:
1) a traveller with the lust for life; and
2) a traveller with the passion for life.
These two I have described below:
In the lust for life you push yourself headlong into anything that will make you grow and move up at the high cost of hurting yourself and hurting others. You may hurt yourself in a way you can't completely justify to yourself. The main character in the book Zahir by Paulo Coelho starts off like this. A man who is a rebel and does many things such as fall in love with women while being married because i would assume each love teaches him something new/is another high. Another set of examples is that of people in the corporate world who stand on somebody else to move up - using politics negatively, to grow.
In the passion for life you keep pushing yourself to grow, keep pushing yourself as far as you can but this growth requires that you negate yourself. You still feel pain, but this pain you can "completely justify" to yourself and you therefore don't feel the hurt despite the pain. You grow stronger, wakeup more empowered the next day, the next moment. And in all this you definitely don't hurt others, you improve them along the way! Ghandi sounds like such a character. An easier example for us to relate to is probably of that student who works hard in his studies - staying up nights when required; a teacher who goes the extra mile to make sure he communicates what he knows to his students; an investigator who follows up on all possible leads until by process of elimination he finds what he is looking for or a citizen who stands up for his rights against many difficult odds.
How many of us are in fact obsessed with this journey? I know many are content. And among those obsessed with the journey how few are those that don't lust after it?
I keep trying to learn rules and principles which will keep me happy; rules that can always be replaced for better ones...another such rule that I think will help in my journey to ITHACA to fight the Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,the angry Poseidonis (click on here to read about my post on ITHACA), this, a lesson I have picked up: the realisation that people who want to grow like me can go about it in two ways. These I describe as:
1) a traveller with the lust for life; and
2) a traveller with the passion for life.
These two I have described below:
In the lust for life you push yourself headlong into anything that will make you grow and move up at the high cost of hurting yourself and hurting others. You may hurt yourself in a way you can't completely justify to yourself. The main character in the book Zahir by Paulo Coelho starts off like this. A man who is a rebel and does many things such as fall in love with women while being married because i would assume each love teaches him something new/is another high. Another set of examples is that of people in the corporate world who stand on somebody else to move up - using politics negatively, to grow.
In the passion for life you keep pushing yourself to grow, keep pushing yourself as far as you can but this growth requires that you negate yourself. You still feel pain, but this pain you can "completely justify" to yourself and you therefore don't feel the hurt despite the pain. You grow stronger, wakeup more empowered the next day, the next moment. And in all this you definitely don't hurt others, you improve them along the way! Ghandi sounds like such a character. An easier example for us to relate to is probably of that student who works hard in his studies - staying up nights when required; a teacher who goes the extra mile to make sure he communicates what he knows to his students; an investigator who follows up on all possible leads until by process of elimination he finds what he is looking for or a citizen who stands up for his rights against many difficult odds.
How many of us are in fact obsessed with this journey? I know many are content. And among those obsessed with the journey how few are those that don't lust after it?
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