The whole world is out to get you. All the signs are there. You never get a lucky break. People always treat you like dirt. And the few people who are nice? They’re after something, obviously. Everyone else is on a life-long personal vendetta to make your existence slightly more unpleasant: the people at the bank, your boss, politicians, that team you support who always loses just to spite you, and random children & animals who insist on walking in front of you when you’re so busy mulling the sorry state of the world.

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Few amongst us take stock of our lives regularly, if ever. But, there are those occasions when life forces us to rethink and re-evaluate where we have come from, and where we are heading. These are significant, pivotal moments when drastic changes compel us to take a few moments in thought and see the forest for the trees. Wouldn’t it be better if we were asking ourselves these questions and answering them honestly when there wasn’t a proverbial gun held to our heads? I think so, and I wanted to share with you one of the ways I do it.

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Go forth and have an affair to remember. I’m not advocating promiscuity in your relationships, but rather in your creativity and your ideas. The good thing is that ideas don’t have feelings that can be hurt, or self esteems that can be crushed. Your mixing it up a bit with your ideas is not going to make you a bad person, just a more creative one.

In a few more days we will be at the vernal equinox. Spring is here, and in this age of global warming, you might as well take advantage of the weather to have a summer fling a little early. A spring fling with a new idea is the perfect way to kick start your creativity and be happier in the process.

Why is it then that so few of us take this plunge into a whirlwind romance? There are usually three reasons we get stuck in a rut when it comes to ideas:
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I received an interesting comment recently, on my post about cynicism in the environmental movement. Not just a comment but also a question about learning and facing situations where we are forced to learn against our beliefs. Like all good questions it was simply not possible to dismiss it with a short answer in the comment thread, so it gets its own post. The comment I got was this:

I’m joseph and 14 years old. And I NEVER belived once in global warming. But I hate it that my science teacher is theaching us global warming. I don’t realy want to particapate in it, but if I dont, I just might fail this class. And I don’t want that. what am i gonna do?

And what follows is my reply to Joseph, and the little bit of Joseph in all of us.

Dear Joseph,

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Do you think you know what perseverance is? We all do. If you have attempted anything beyond mere survival on this planet, you have surely come across obstacles, at which point someone has advised you to persevere, universally understood as sticking to it. While that tells you what persevering involves, it does not enlighten you on how to go about this whole business of sticking to it.

To understand how to persevere you must understand that perseverance is not a singular concept but a plural one. The two ‘P’s of perseverance must become your constant companions and your close friends if you are to last the distance and reach your goals.

Persistence is the active phase of perseverance. To persist is to act according to your plans and aims, no matter what the discouraging results and circumstances. You must often become an unstoppable force of positive action in the shadow of stiff opposition, both internal and external, to achieve most things of value. Such is the nature of things, and this is the price you must pay for striving beyond the mundane.

Patience is the passive phase of perseverance and is an acknowledgment of the fact that striving doesn’t always solve everything. The universe is a complex thing with an infinite number of variables and forces constantly at play. To say that circumstances are ever-changing and that things are not always conducive to restless action is an understatement. Often to persevere is to simply wait for better times to come, so that so that when you take the proper action, you get the expected results.

This patience in the face of unavoidable circumstance is a much ignored part of perseverance. It is as essential a component of it as the much celebrated persistence. To court one without the counsel of the other is to invite disaster, because the persistent juggernaut destroys all in its path and the patient Buddha often fails to set off on the path in the first place. Either way a pleasant journey is impossible and the end unreachable.

Befriend both the juggernaut and the Buddha within, and make sure you learn to temper their strengths with the fine guiding hand of human compassion. Do this and your every journey will be a success and your every destination in reach.

Samir

Written in response to the Litemind Personal Excellence Project

Conformity vs individuality is a matter very close to the discussion about the originality of creative ideas, which I have gotten into before and I am sure I will again. The question of individuality was brought up again recently when I received a comment on my article about creativity and religious thought from Curtis who said:

If your life revolves around what others think of you, as these words seem to suggest, then Ayn Rand is not the author for you.

A grand pronuncement indeed on what was a personal story about my second-hand exposure to the works of Ayn Rand and how I hadn’t gotten around to reading them. I’m generally in the habit of questioning grand pronouncements, or at least digging deeper into them, so I thought it only right that I explore further this whole phenomenon of caring about what other people think of you, and also caring about whether other people think you care about what other people think of you!

My response to accusations about caring what other people think: So what?
Yes, you heard me right. So What? What devine herald declared caring what other people think to be incompatible with free thinking and individuality? Confusing? Let me attempt to make sense of it all.

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If my Mother was around today, I’m sure she would recommend I read a book by Ayn Rand, just as my Father does on a regular basis. I’m quite sure she had read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in her youth and would have thought highly of them. Her sister, my aunt, was and still is absolutely crazy about those two books. Needless to say she has recommended them to me wholeheartedly on numerous occasions. I remember seeing her copy of The Fountainhead many years ago, it was tattered and disintegrating at the spine from having been devoured on so many occasions over the decades. She guards that old copy with her life for fear of losing it to that scourge of bibliophiles everywhere, unscrupulous book borrowers.

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