There comes a time for decisions…
We all avoid pain. Which doesn’t mean that we can avoid it. We just avoid the pain we haven’t experienced for the pain that we have. Known hell is like a heaven in face of an unknown hell. That’s about all you need to know about heaven and hell.
I have seen that the greatest virtue in life is ability to make decisions. Ability to find what needs to be done is perhaps the most important thing in life. Krishna went so far as to say in Bhagwad Gita that Indecision is the “greatest sin”. That is very true. When you are confronted with a tough road or no road at all, then what do you do?
People keep working while their careers are falling apart and jobs slowly becoming outdated without making adequate preparation for a change. Hoping against hope that what befalls the economy will somehow, not affect them. That is plain nonsense.
Either you put a cost to your failure or the failure will put a cost on you.
You cannot escape the cost in a changing world.
In a career one keep doing things to earn money, but rarely to do the best one can, given his/her talents and gifts. Recognizing what your gifts are, is perhaps the toughest of all, but it is to be done. And it is done only through extreme truthfulness to one’s own self. Usually, what is coveted is what we strive to get and generally either we force our selves to align with it or pretend to be so. We may do it that way, but it will eventually show up in our stress levels very soon. It shows up when there is an inherent value and personality conflict.
The race for money.. for power.. .for prestige etc.. push us in a direction where we lose our core self. These things are not bad things per se. Money is great and power is very useful if it can help, but to make these central to your lives such that your life runs on these things can make things really bad.
In such situations, when a person reaches his/her mid life – like I have – I see most people asking themselves the most fundamental question – “Has it all been really worth it?”
All the toil and all the racing.. was it worth doing it all? Many times the answer lies in the question itself. The reason this question is asked points to the eventual answer. But does one change course? Some do. Many don’t. Because they know no better. Because they haven’t made an attempt to know any better. They have followed a path to disaster and no matter how painful that is, they will keep following it to eventual disaster. After all if one has to go down, why not go down in style??
But, then there comes a comes a time in one’s life when one can run no more and is forced to deal with his/her own devils… HEADON… alone! And no one can help him/her with that.