Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
Every day, since the day I started off on my own, I had been choosing to stay at it. I was choosing to continue working in my practice preferring it to any other choices available to me. Until I came to this realization, I did not know that I had the option of leaving my law firm in search of something that made me happier. For me, the success I had already achieved in my firm was more than I ever expected so I was not allowing myself to consider that I could do even better.
I wanted to know where I was going wrong by making my decisions based on how much money I had instead of what I really wanted to do. Money is essential in everything that we want to do. I cannot wake up one morning and go buy a new house unless I have the money for it. I cannot get what I want until I have made the money to afford it. This is the premise we all proceed from when making decisions in our lives.
This is where I was going wrong. I should not have been letting money limit what I wanted to do because, as I said, there is a big world out there which offers a huge variety of options. Our abilities as human beings are not limited in any way. It is us who allow our abilities to pursue what we want to be limited by money. I should have learned from my own success that what matters is not how much money I have but how much I want something. I had made a few important decisions in my life based on what I wanted and I found a way to pay for those things no matter what. I did not allow the amount of money I had limit my ability to do what I wanted.
The revelation I experienced then was that I possessed the ability to get whatever I wanted. I just had to want it enough to throw all caution to the wind and GO FOR IT. This revelation left me with a blank. It was like I had met a genie who was ready to give me whatever my heart desired. Where do I start on the list of what I wanted? How does one know what one wants in this world of variety?
To answer this question, I had to look back on my life and think about how I had been deciding on what I wanted and why I wanted it. Why did I want to help my mother? Why did I want to adopt my niece and nephew? Why did I want to leave employment? I knew that each time I made these decisions, I had this really strong feeling inside me that I had to satisfy. These are things which I felt obliged to do and I knew that if I did not do them, my life would be miserable because I could not stop thinking about them. Not doing them would have made me feel guilty and dissatisfied with my life. What was this feeling and how could I recognize it in everything else in my life when making choices?
I had to pull out the dictionary to find an English word to describe this feeling. A word which I could relate to this feeling and use when making my choices. It would be the word that I would use in deciding what I wanted to do each day when I woke up. Ambition? Determination? Drive?
The word was revealed to me one morning when I woke up and was trying to decide what I wanted to do that day. I turned over and looked at my husband sleeping and I wondered what the hell he was doing there. What had driven me to agreeing to spend the rest of my life with him when I was so happy being single? The feeling was the same because I knew that I could not be happy without him and I had to have him in my life. The word to describe that feeling is PASSION. Its definition according to the dictionary I referred to is simply; “a very strong feeling”. I was passionate about these things so I did everything I needed to do to get them. When I get passionate about something, I feel like my body is expanding and if I don’t get that thing, I will burst.
That was the past, what about my future? Was there something I was feeling passionate about at that time in my life? Was I passionate about teaching? I wondered what was causing me to feel passionate and whether I could make myself passionate about something, anything. How do I dig up this feeling called passion so that it could direct me towards what I wanted?
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
Every day, since the day I started off on my own, I had been choosing to stay at it. I was choosing to continue working in my practice preferring it to any other choices available to me. Until I came to this realization, I did not know that I had the option of leaving my law firm in search of something that made me happier. For me, the success I had already achieved in my firm was more than I ever expected so I was not allowing myself to consider that I could do even better.
I wanted to know where I was going wrong by making my decisions based on how much money I had instead of what I really wanted to do. Money is essential in everything that we want to do. I cannot wake up one morning and go buy a new house unless I have the money for it. I cannot get what I want until I have made the money to afford it. This is the premise we all proceed from when making decisions in our lives.
This is where I was going wrong. I should not have been letting money limit what I wanted to do because, as I said, there is a big world out there which offers a huge variety of options. Our abilities as human beings are not limited in any way. It is us who allow our abilities to pursue what we want to be limited by money. I should have learned from my own success that what matters is not how much money I have but how much I want something. I had made a few important decisions in my life based on what I wanted and I found a way to pay for those things no matter what. I did not allow the amount of money I had limit my ability to do what I wanted.
The revelation I experienced then was that I possessed the ability to get whatever I wanted. I just had to want it enough to throw all caution to the wind and GO FOR IT. This revelation left me with a blank. It was like I had met a genie who was ready to give me whatever my heart desired. Where do I start on the list of what I wanted? How does one know what one wants in this world of variety?
To answer this question, I had to look back on my life and think about how I had been deciding on what I wanted and why I wanted it. Why did I want to help my mother? Why did I want to adopt my niece and nephew? Why did I want to leave employment? I knew that each time I made these decisions, I had this really strong feeling inside me that I had to satisfy. These are things which I felt obliged to do and I knew that if I did not do them, my life would be miserable because I could not stop thinking about them. Not doing them would have made me feel guilty and dissatisfied with my life. What was this feeling and how could I recognize it in everything else in my life when making choices?
I had to pull out the dictionary to find an English word to describe this feeling. A word which I could relate to this feeling and use when making my choices. It would be the word that I would use in deciding what I wanted to do each day when I woke up. Ambition? Determination? Drive?
The word was revealed to me one morning when I woke up and was trying to decide what I wanted to do that day. I turned over and looked at my husband sleeping and I wondered what the hell he was doing there. What had driven me to agreeing to spend the rest of my life with him when I was so happy being single? The feeling was the same because I knew that I could not be happy without him and I had to have him in my life. The word to describe that feeling is PASSION. Its definition according to the dictionary I referred to is simply; “a very strong feeling”. I was passionate about these things so I did everything I needed to do to get them. When I get passionate about something, I feel like my body is expanding and if I don’t get that thing, I will burst.
That was the past, what about my future? Was there something I was feeling passionate about at that time in my life? Was I passionate about teaching? I wondered what was causing me to feel passionate and whether I could make myself passionate about something, anything. How do I dig up this feeling called passion so that it could direct me towards what I wanted?
No comments:
Post a Comment