Given my propensity toward depression, I’ve been trying to find things to help keep me focused on what is good in my life, on the possible and the happy to try to fight my natural tendency to see the roadblocks, the idiots, and the problems of life in the foreground. To that end, I’ve been reading these “daily motivators” that show up on my customized myway.com portal page. This is today’s:
There is a way
Always keep in mind that there is a way to get where you desire to go. What you can imagine is possible. Otherwise you could not have imagined it. Achievement is not a matter of “if.” It is a matter of “why” and “how.”
There is most assuredly a way. Your deepest desires are not empty. They are not without meaning. They point the way for your efforts. There is a way out. There is a way through. There is a way leading to whatever you can imagine for yourself.
There is a way to what you desire, because the essence and value of what you desire is largely composed of the path you follow to achieve it. When you have the desire you will, without fail, have the means to fulfill that desire. Act with assurance, with confidence, with faith. Though the efforts may be difficult and the setbacks many, with each moment the goal is more completely fulfilled.
I’ve been reading these things for months now but it wasn’t clear to me until today just what was causing that nagging feeling that I was missing something: the parameters are missing.
Yes, I know, this is supposed to be about thinking positive, about achieving the impossible dream (and how hard it is to resist the urge to break out into song just now) but the fact remains that for all but the richest of us (well, when you have everything losing something doesn’t sting so badly) and the poorest of us (when you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose) there are restrictions on our lives. Some of those restrictions are voluntary, some are what we were born into; regardless, they are the box, the metaphorical cubicle, in which we must fit our lives.
I guess what I really need is advice on how to cope when my desires are outside the bounds of my restrictions, when I can achieve half of what I want with the resources I have but in no way could I ever hope to achieve the other half regardless of how much I strive. Perhaps that’s what religion is really all about: providing in a subtle way the advice and comfort that is, at its base, boiled down to “You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”
Hi –
Well – this post covers a lot of ground.
Toward the end you said: “… guess what I really need is advice on how to cope when my desires are outside the bounds of my restrictions, when I can achieve half of what I want with the resources I have but in no way could I ever hope to achieve the other half regardless of how much I strive. Perhaps that’s what religion is really all about…”
In a way I think that *is* what religion is about – or whatever coherent understanding you have of reality. Everybody has something of this sort, but often it is implicit, unexamined – and very frequently, incoherent. Here is where it can pay off to ask the big questions.
As for incoherence – I think that motivator stuff you quoted is a good example. One part said, “Always keep in mind that there is a way to get where you desire to go. What you can imagine is possible. Otherwise you could not have imagined it.” This simply isn’t true. There are what you referred to as restrictions. And the restrictions really vitiate the entire argument – and render it incoherent.
You finished by saying that perhaps religion offers in a “subtle way the advice and comfort that is, at its base, boiled down to “You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”
Well, for even this to be true, you have to develop a rather abstruse understanding of what you need. And here, indeed, religion does come in. At its best it provides tools and aids to reach this understanding, and a context in which it is meaningful. The context is the foundation of real optimism.
My own personal belief is that when I work out what I *really* need I will find that it *is* what I desire – it is greater than my greatest desire – and there is nothing to prevent me from having it.
I’ve seen enough, by the way, to know that this is not just a way to pacify my real, but unreachable desires (and you know at least one of these 😉 It is a way of understanding the reality beneath their surface.
The only real restriction on me pursuing this right now is my own laziness. Other restrictions may arise at any moment of course – but until then…
I don’t know if it’s any help for me to tell you what I believe – but I know that I’ve moved from being very negative to being quite positive. It is possible.