Faith (n.) mid-13c., faith, feith, fei, fai “faithfulness to a trust or promise; loyalty to a person; honesty, truthfulness,” from Anglo-French and Old French feid, foi “faith, belief, trust, confidence; pledge” (11c.), from Latin fides “trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief,” from root of fidere “to trust,”from PIE root *bheidh- “to trust, confide, persuade.” Faith means believing, trusting in something, and having confidence that everything will work out in the end. Faith is a verb, an action word that requires patience, hope and unwavering belief in yourself and the universe. As General Douglas MacArthur once said, ” Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals.… You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.“
In faith, there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.” — Blaise Pascal
It is easy to have faith when everything is going well as you planned it, but the real test of your faith comes in how you deal with the trying times. Life is a rollercoaster of ups and downs, good and bad, triumphs and crises, trials and tribulations, peaks and valleys. Whatever will go wrong will eventually go wrong (Murphy’s Law). It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when. No one has a problem-free life. Faith is the key to navigating the vicissitudes of life, and keeping the faith when the going gets tough is a very challenging skill to master. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once quipped, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” You need faith to start anything new, a business, a routine, a regimen, a blog, leaving corporate 9-5, leaving social media or going on any less travelled path.
As Martina McBride sang in her song “Do It Anyway.”
You can spend your whole life building
Something from nothin’
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway
You can chase a dream
That seems so out of reach
And you know it might not never come your way
Dream it anyway
In his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, Late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs advised:
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
Don’t devise a Five-Year Plan or a Great Leap Forward 2. Central planning didn’t work for Stalin or Mao, and it won’t work for an entrepreneur either. Slavishly follow a specific step-by-step strategy, the process gurus tell you. It’ll always work, they say. Not in my world. Predicting the future’s impossible. You work hard because it increases the odds. But there’s no guarantee; much is dependent on what cards happen to get dealt. I have always believed in playing as many hands as possible, as intelligently as I can, and taking the best of what comes my way. Every significant advance I or my company has ever made has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary: small earned steps—not big lucky hits.
Planning has its place; the actual thought process sometimes leads to great new ideas. But you can only accomplish what’s possible when you get there.
Meditations
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Risk
Risk involves stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing the unknown. If we want to grow as human beings, we have to learn to take risks. It is not easy to take risks, and that is why we gravitate towards what is familiar: it feels safe. When we try new things, we risk discomfort, humiliation, and failure. But we have to step out of our comfort zone if we want to grow.
If you want to learn a new skill, like learning a new language, you must experience discomfort and risk looking foolish. Growth necessitates risk. As we take more risks, we become more comfortable with discomfort and acquire a stronger tolerance for what feels scary and unfamiliar.
‘It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.’ – Anne Lamott
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Mindfulness for You
We all have our preferences, and it is the same with mindfulness.
American ballet dancer Misty Copeland on her meditation practice:
“Ballet class is a form of meditation for me. It’s something that I do every single morning, and it’s nice to have a space in time where your body knows that you’re working to become stronger. There are times before shows where I put on music and focus on my breathing just to stay calm and not get too nervous about the performance. I always try to find less conventional ways to clear my mind.”
Since we are unique and different, it would make sense that our meditation practice would also be different. If you look for it, you will find a natural flow for your own meditative style in your daily life. It is all about identifying times when you can be completely present and aware—present with your thoughts and body and aware of your experience of the moment. Meditation helps keep the noise of the world at bay.
Daily Trip with Jeff Warren – Gorgeously Neutral
In meditation, you learn that things that you once thought were boring, like breathing, can actually be perfectly fulfilling when you focus on them. That is because any idea with a “problem” comes from the mind.
Podcast
- Venus Williams: THIS Is How You TRAIN YOUR MIND For SUCCESS, CONFIDENCE, & FULFILLMENT
Greatness: Giving all that you have is about your effort. What is the point of being great if you are not happy? Have fun while you do it. Your life is your soundtrack. Have a good time.
All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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