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The Road Map Ahead

P. A. Joseph P. A. Joseph
27 Feb 2023
My mode of life and functioning must be in fever-pitch, really tough and strong, and able to endure for long.

As I discover the road map for the year ahead, this should challenge and guide my path in the future. The past must fuel the present. As I look at my life there are areas and points that are fine and inspiring.  These are well registered in my memory. We should collect these strayed fragments and take guidance from all these. In that way my past, present and future are well knit to make my life a continuous and contiguous whole. According to Soren Kierkegaard, the great modern philosopher, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”. For Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, “you cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. Hence you have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, and whatever”. This enables me to have a sense of continuity to go ahead. 

We need to be passionate about each moment of our life. If I aim at success, my life has to be strenuous, fatiguing, and tensed but meaningful and joyful, though often visited by moments of dizziness, panic, loneliness, and insecurity. I must try the hardest way to achieve the objective, my mission. At times I feel I have not found my mission in life, and in that case it is definite that my task is first to discover my mission.  Benjamin Franklin, the US statesman, diplomat, inventor and scientist, said: “There are three extremely hard things in this world: steel, diamond, and knowing oneself”.  

I must develop a sense of covenant, never giving up a task I have undertaken. Continuous effort to keep on is a powerful grace. If I don’t do anything, death will come soon; or rather I have already died, or have become a zombie. The greatest secret and lesson for longevity is keep busy and embrace covenant spirit. This will have to be accompanied by sincerity, simplicity, purity, patience and perseverance. I must ask myself: Am I living or dead! Probably others will judge me well.

My mode of life and functioning must be in fever-pitch, really tough and strong, and able to endure for long. A powerful energy comes from sharing space with other people who are operating in fever pitch. Similarly, “when something has a name, it starts to exist in our reality, while, if it lacks a name, it fades away in the universe of the abstract and immaterial …in the same way the written word has more power than a thousand vague ideas in our head” (Hector Garcia). 

Another aspect or dimension of my life is that I must be enthusiastic in my life and activities. It is really inspiring to see enthusiastic operators in different kinds of life. Whatever area they enter they manifest the dynamism of enthusiasm. It is said that if you want an urgent work to be done, ask a person who is busy; he/she will do it better than a person who is not busy at all. This is the dynamism of enthusiasm.

Besides, in my undertakings I must insist upon quality than quantity. In quantity one goes to the huge mass but in quality one goes to details, relevance and precision.

After making so many rules for my life-movements, I will do well to question myself regarding my performance in the past, the lessons I learnt in my life, and the reasons thereof, where I failed to be connected in life-dots, and how do I reconnect the dots now, and how to resolve in changing situations etc. In any case I need to be relaxed, positive, and decisive.

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