“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

If no one has reminded you of late, You are a king, queen, and royalty; you exemplify excellence and exude greatness. We all started life tabula rasa as a blank slate without any inbuilt mental construct, indoctrination, programming, imprinting and domestication. While growing up, we had wild dreams about what we could become and aspire to be. We answered the question, ” What do you want to be when you grow up? With much zeal, with answers ranging from pilot, engineer, doctor, astronaut, architect, etc. We answered the question based on what we saw around us, our family and friends’ job positions, media, religion, and counselling sessions.

When we grow up as adults, most of us choose to live a quiet desperation based on our choices or living to other people’s expectations of us. We stay in toxic relationships, go to jobs we are not growing in, and engage with the familiar instead of moving out of our comfort zone. Society is structured so that we naturally drift towards homeostasis, our natural human tendency to take the path of least resistance. As Henry David Thoreau puts it in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”

When it is so easy to get our thinking done for us, the big temptation is not to think. We glance at the newspaper headlines and let them form our opinions, and we neglect to read the scholarly articles in the monthly magazine that would give us the meat on the subject. We listen to a few minutes of the radio and flatter ourselves that we know about the Symphony. We read a play review and decide that we don’t need to see the play itself. These are the temptations of the average person today. ¹

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report, the average full-time worker works 41.36 hours per week. Assuming people work 48 weeks per year means they spend 1,985.28 hours per year working. Life expectancy is 73, and according to the OECD, people retire at about 63. If people begin working at 22, then the average person works 41 years. Forty-one years of work at 1,985.28 hours per year is 81,396 total hours. This estimate is conservative and may even be low; another estimate finds that people work over 115,000 hours in a lifetime. Gallup found that 60% of people are emotionally detached at work, and 19% are miserable.

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.” – George Carlin

Where you are right now is not who you are, you are not present job description. It is okay to do a survival/stop-gap job for a while to get yourself settled in a new city; it is okay to struggle for a while; what you are going through right now is not your final destination; everything eventually passes, every wound eventually heals. Don’t forget who you are – you are greatness exemplified. Your present situation might make you forget your awesomeness or even doubt your capability and ingenuity; don’t. You are closer than you think; the journey is the reward.

Rock bottom ² is very often where we begin on our healing journey. This is not because we suddenly see the light, not because our worst days are magically transmuted into some type of epiphany, and not because someone saves us from our own madness. Rock bottom becomes a turning point because it is only at that point that most people think: I never want to feel this way again.

When you decide you truly do not ever want to feel a certain way again, you set out on a journey of self-awareness, learning, and growth that has you radically reinvent who you are. In that moment, fault becomes irrelevant. You’re no longer mulling over who did what or how you’ve been wronged. In that moment, only one thing guides you, and it is this: No matter what it takes, I will never accept my life getting to this point again.

Rock bottom isn’t a bad day. It doesn’t happen by chance. We only arrive at rock bottom when our habits begin to compound upon one another when our coping mechanisms have spiralled so out of control that we can no longer resist the feelings we were attempting to hide. Remaining attached to your old life is the first and final act of self-sabotage, and releasing it is what we must prepare for to truly be willing to see real change.

“We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. That was the genesis of that campaign.” – Steve Jobs on Think Different Campaign

There’s a saying that inside every individual, there are six people. They are . .³

Who You Are Reputed to Be
Who You Are Expected to Be
Who You Were
Who You Wish to Be
Who You Think You Are
Who You Really Are

You must strive to be true to who you really are. If you do and you do the right thing, then you will increase in courage.

C. V. White commented:

The man who makes a success of an important venture never waits for the crowd. He strikes out for himself. It takes nerve, it takes a lot of grit; but the man that succeeds has both. Anyone can fail. The public admires the man who has enough confidence in himself to take the chance. These chances are the main things after all. The man who tries to succeed must expect to be criticized. Nothing important was ever done but the greater number consulted previously doubted the possibility. Success is the accomplishment of that which people think can’t be done.

“Success is absolutely wonderful, but it’s not who you are. Who you are is measured by something way more abstract and emotional, ethereal, than outward success.” – Viola Davis, Finding Me

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Insights

Often thoughts have a sticky quality to them, they pull on our attention, they get wrapped up in them and forget about our practice. It is challenging because thoughts can feel important, our mind is a problem-solving device; it naturally looks for problems and seeks out solutions.
However important the thoughts that arise may seem, see if you can let them go and return your attention to the breath.

There is a vast silence around us always. Wherever we are, we can take a deep breath, feel our body, open our senses and step outside the endless stories of the mind. – Jack Kornfield

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Overwelhm Freeze

Overwelhm Freeze, your list has become so daunting and intimidating that your brain perceives it as a jungle bath in the wild as a threat.
Break down your massive tasks into tiny pieces. Allow yourself to do a bad job at least at first. Often when we get overwhelmed, it is because we feel pressure to excel but it is usually easier to fix something that exists than to create something that doesn’t. Done is better than perfect 99% of the time.
Devise little incentives. Change Scenery – Your environment can have a huge impact on your state of mind, your focus and energy,