“Success demands singleness of purpose”
“Goals are important to living life”
“We all have a purpose in life”
“Live for something, have a purpose”
“If you don’t have a goal, you’re not going anywhere”
Familiar with those words? colorful words fade when they are in your head and sometimes the source is unclear. Words that often appear on motivational pages or even spoken by motivators that are supposed to raise one’s passion for a successful life. How about this?
It’s called life mapping, they present it as a plan for their future and what accomplishments have to achieve. As depicted in the road map, it is clear that they plan a flawless life with some greatest achievements. Such as participating in various competitions or volunteering, getting scholarships, getting cum laude predicate, to continuing education abroad. We got a fire soul here.
Okay, that’s enough and I’m sick of that. Sorry to say, but life won’t let you live smoothly with all that positivity and it is hard to imagine that all of your flawless life plans will be taking a place. Thinking that life is full of possibilities, there’s a possibility that you were rejected by the volunteering agency, there’s a possibility that you will lose when joining in the competition, or even you don’t know where you are good at, there’s a possibility that you will not be accepted for a scholarship due to the fight is tight, there’s a possibility that you will not extend your education abroad because your parents can’t make it and then you have to get a job to ease their shoulders. Now, all your life plans are worthless, you didn’t get what you proposed earlier. Seems that I’ve just snuffed out this fire soul, I’m a bad guy here.
But think about it, it’s not enough to constantly strive for bigger accomplishments. Sometimes we overlooked appreciating every little moment, as that is what makes life truly worth living because the best part of living isn’t chasing ambition or catching hold of a fleeting dream, but it’s just living every minute of it. Explore your passion but be cautious not to make it an obsession, you may want your passion to drive your life, but that doesn’t mean you have to make it on top of everything. Because, on the other hand, you can still live a meaningful life despite your passion being unfulfilled.
My old friend took me hiking and that became my first time. No half-hearted, the peak that I climbed is the highest mountain in West Java, Ciremai. But, there is a 30-year-old soul in my 19-year-old body. So the walk to the top took a full day because I frequently asked my friends to take a break and walk slowly. I reached the top with a limp body, I couldn’t even feel my legs and arms but we made it. There are so many people here who capture the moment they have finally reached the top. But not to me, I just living in the moment and questioning. I’ve been to the mountain top, is this what I’m fighting for? there’s nothing here but craters, wind, rocks, and a whole view from above. Or is it just me who doesn’t feel it? or is it just this?
Back when I was in school, I’ve been really obsessed to be an engineer and I spent a lot of time struggling for it (Read the full story at A Reason Why DevOps). It looks very promising to me because the rare supply of human resources makes the price high. After a few months of fighting for it, I got one. I really enjoyed it and was grateful at first. I feel the growth in myself, not even 1 year I worked, one big company offered me an opportunity and I grew even faster there. However, there is a phase where I get bored because I no longer feel the challenge like my first month. I feel that my duties are so so until I think of moving to a different company even bigger to discover a new atmosphere and feel the challenges like the old ways.
But then it reminds me of a story about a fish. He swims up to an older fish and says “I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.” “The ocean?” the older fish says, “That’s what you’re in right now.” “This”, says the young fish, “This is water. What I want is the ocean!”
It means that we are already in the ocean, we already have everything we could ever dream of but we think it’s nothing remarkable or not as imagined before, we think it’s just water, and we waste our lives looking for “the ocean” just because we ignore to understand that we are already in it.
I thought being on the top of the highest mountain would be astonishing, but it wasn’t. It turned out that what was remarkable to me was the journey to get there. I’ve never hiked this high, I’ve never walked this far, I’ve never been this tired, I saw a lot of new things, I saw plants and animals that are not found anywhere else, I breathed a different air from other places. The meaning of the journey is not when I reach my destination, but when I back to go home, a journey that makes a home feels like it should.
I felt off at work not because there are no more challenges or my duty is so so. Instead of the work that gets easier, it’s because I’ve grown up, so completing the task is not as difficult as it used to be even though the task given is getting more difficult. Turns out my duty is vital like, providing a resource to keep reliable and maintaining the resource expense until we were once trusted to be a webinar speaker on best practices. I always wanted bigger things until I’m addicted and I started to get used to them which made me lose sensitivity to many small things. Even though it was the small things, but they prepared me to be set for the bigger things.
We often try to pursue the meaning of life in big things like money, education, or career but the truth is, life is just a bigger part made from smaller things that need to be appreciated but sometimes overlooked, like having a trustworthy friend, having supportive parents, having a delightful food, having a good movie, and having a time just to stop and breathing for relish the day. Keep it in our mind that there’s more to life than just pursuing one thing. Otherwise, you lose sight of the things around you, enslaved by passion, and assume that nothing else has any meaning among the other.
