Two main lessons for life
Around 2-3 years ago I started to realize it unconsciously. Today at last I can assign these thoughts some words. Two significant lessons for life. A reminder. For self, others. The more often man reminds that, the more beneficial to himself.
- You are dying.
- You are a fool.
Lesson 1: You are dying
Look at the clock. Seconds go by. Your seconds. Irreversible. Each second you live and die at the same time. Once a precious friend of mind told me this thought: death and life go hand in hand. Human carries Death through all his life and when he’s tired, they simply switch. Understanding this brings some divine respect for time. Own first. Then other’s. This premise puts a nano-filter on all life choices. And from here there are only two ways. Either you want to use it as effectively as you can, or you just don’t care. Sport or TV series? Restaurant or home cooking? Yes or No? Now or later? Maybe never? And so forth. When you get conscious of your existence in time you suddenly are able to stop it. Subjectively – of course. Stopped time in past could be most easily found in memories. That, what you do not wish, but even can not erase. Unity of scenery, emotions, sounds, scents and physiological feelings stuck in a head. At this point Jordan Belfort comes to help:
No matter what happened to you in your past, you are not your past, you are the resources and the capabilities you glean from it. And that is the basis for all change.
Hence being able to recognize where time stops, it could be stopped in the future as well. Hint: extraordinary phenomenon, experience, feeling, place, scene, thought or any collision of those.
Lesson 2: You are a fool
You will never know everything. However you can know an awful lot in one or several fields. Eating the fruits of your work become ace, professional, teacher, guru, leader. This is where arrogance trap lies. “Look how it’s done; you don’t know shit” – usually it spreads not as evidently, but by tricking yourself trying to preserve “good guy” image. We can control words, but hiding this message in body language, stance, voice tone is far more complicated. A little misstep in this road and you realize you arrived at a totally different station, unlike the one you have been aiming at first. You are Pro, but without integrity. Somewhere along the way you lost your standard virtues. Then you have to do a reset – set yourself to zero.
Relativity of comparison
You are a fool – no matter what you already know. Take a new activity, interest field. Do not let yourself snooze on laurels – learn and grow your moral capital. Whichever path you would go, you will always find worse, less advanced, poorer, dumber or otherwise inferior people. Equally you could look at your idols stupefied. Actors, artists, writers, entrepreneurs and not comprehend how did they do or did accomplish something that changed the world.
Depending on where do you put yourself on this scale and looking at the neighbor you could either destroy yourself picking the last pieces of self confidence or the opposite – pretending to be a sea captain, while standing in a puddle. You should be your own reference in the past. Once in a while stop and look back. Did you change your attitude towards things? Change, in this case not a visual one – is the best evidence, that you are not standing still. Seems like at this point Fyodor Dostoyevsky agrees with me:
A fool, who admitted to himself he is a fool is not a fool anymore.
Hope you found these lessons for life meaningful. They certainly shaped my thinking forward… Good luck!
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