How Can We Better Pilot Our Lives?

I see passion as a liminal space between this world and the next. It is the world of make-believe, the world of our own mythology. It is the world of storytelling and legend. We are the legends telling etching ourselves in stone in the pursuit and expression of applied insight and wisdom. It is a place where we unleash our imagination and free ourselves from the mundane to transcend the ordinary world. It is a state of animism where the world comes alive. The stories we tell ourselves mediates our experiences and the songs we listen to take us on a magic carpet ride.

It is in this world where we create our own cosmos.

To be in this state is one of the crowning achievement of our lives. But we don’t know it, till we outgrow this state of play. We grow stiff. We grow fearful. We grow stale. We have a choice, it seems, between relinquishing control and hurling ourselves in the great unknown. We can treat our lives like a great adventure. But a truth seeking journey requires not knowing what is gonna happen and the willingness to accept what might happen is not to our liking. We scoff at the unpreparedness of mapping these territories, yet the irony is that deep down in the bottom of our hearts, we know all the good shit happens when we’re off the reservation.

Great things happen at the edge of our comfort zone.

In response, we say we crave for security. We want physical, emotional and financial security. We want to feel safe. We want to be in control of our circumstance. We come up with a schedule that defends from chaos and whim. It becomes a net for catchin days. We build systems to hold us in place, and in return for security, we kill our human spirit.

We crush the desire for adventure and transformation, till one day we realise we can no longer surrender ourselves even to the slightest bit of risk taking.

Every once in awhile, we find ourselves losing focus at work. The truth is we don’t really care for our work at that very moment. It requires a honest reflection as to whether we need a break, a vacation or a change of career. At this point in time, we realise that we all have freedom. The freedom that always come from the renewed awareness of our choice. We have far more control in our lives than many embrace. We create or recreate our personal experiences in life, and each day is a new opportunity where glimpses of our potential are revealed and expressed. Maybe these instances serve as a reminder to chase after our passion.

Stop saying “I can’t afford it.” Start asking “How can I afford it?”

One is a statement, and the other is a question. One lets you off the hook, and the other requires you to think. We look up to our movie directors, poets and musicians to remind us that there is no limit to the human spirit. We defend our favourite authors saying that those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. We dog-ear our favourite lines in a book and religiously stand by these quotes in our hearts. We all want to hold infinity in the palms of our hands and eternity in an hour. Somewhere along the way, we got beaten down. Somewhere along the way, we lost faith. The next time the turbulence is shaking us subtly out of our comfort zone, let’s embrace it. Because, let’s not forget that an airplane takes off against the wind.