a meaningful life
FOCUS: THE ONLY ROAD TO A MEANINGFUL LIFE!
Vision is hard to follow, because it is a destination and not a road.
Mon.dec.18.2023 - Ubochi Eke
1st you are gifted vision, then you must get creative and now you must stay focused. Here is a bit about focus, I will step back and address creativity, next week.
There is a single road to a Meaningful Life. Don't take suggestions, FOCUS.
As you sharpen your Vision and hone your creativity, the world will present its noise to bounce you off your "glorious" pedestal.
It will present low hanging fruits that do not at all tally with your visions. Scattered easy opportunities that will take you off track and Great wise ideas that are not yours to own. Run, the road to a Meaningful Life is a singular, winding, untarred road, with the beautiful scenery of all the people, things, experiences and inspirations that you need to perfect yourself in order to "give" What you now "have" at the end of the journey and in Return, Receive a Meaningful Life.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FOCUS
Imagine a Meaningful Life as the Best Life and therefore as a result of taking the best possible course. As such it is singular and not any random road.
In Mathematics, you have formulas and they form the best and fastest ways Someone has discovered for solving problems of the arithmetic order. If you are a Mathematician, you may very well question the answers and the formula, and this is your right, because there may well be a faster or better way (formula). However, if you are an average person, you accept the works of those who know better and use the available formula.
In the race/journey/Mathematics of a Meaningful Life, you are the formula and any road that does not plug you in will get a wrong answer, as such you cannot rely on any formula, roadmap, course of actions, approaches and ideological directions that do not "feel" organic to who you are. You therefore must focus, because everyday, new people will come into your life with their own formula, as if to say that your life is "their" math problem and they are great mathematicians.
God is the Mathematician, that wrote the formula that is you, working with nature is the Math equation and when you plug into the equation, impossible things become a Life's work, but in the process, Parents, Siblings, Children, Teachers, Mentors, Friends, Experiences and Historical accounts, all of which "seem" to know better than God, will try to get you to edit the formula.
Focus, "you" are the only road to a Meaningful Life. In fact, in short, a Meaningful Life, simply means a fulfilled life and it is you, that needs the filling, just that sometimes to fill up, you need to give the world all you have, in exchange for all it has in store for you.
A fair exchange, I might add.
LOW HANGING FRUIT
The first challenge to a life of Vision and Creativity, is low hanging fruit. I define this as "clear and easy opportunities that are accessible as you 'are' now".
These are the first suggestions that parents and guardians will present and partners and colleagues will bring to you.
For most people this summarizes as courses in schools that are profitable in your era and in which you seem to thrive, wives and husbands from clans and families that your people "traditionally" marry into, a certain number of kids in line with you position in your family and you immediate economic conditions, a home in line with the location and compensation of your current job etc.
In a practical example, a child that thrives in Mathematics and Sciences will be pushed to Medicine or Engineering, if he thrives in Social Studies, he will be pushed to Law or Law as if Political Science is a crime. A Yoruba woman will be recommended Ijebu Boys and the closest she gets to Igbo prospects is Ijebu Igbo, no considerations given to her "best" options of Igbo or Arewa extraction. A young family with low income will be encouraged to watch the number of kids and chase a figure below 5, forgetting that it might well be the 7th kid that will be King, after all and to them "the world has concluded that you are too poor to birth the King", and even if you were to birth the King, God will be Kind enough to shift him to kid number 2, in view of your poverty, which he should "be aware off".
A young political activist seeks to live among his people but is adviced that to "make it" and advance his cause, he must move to Abuja/Johannesburg/Dar Salam and get work in the civil service to build capital and influence, this advice negating the rot that will occur in his character and its inconsistency with his Visions.
That things are easy for you, do not make them good for you.
A life of meaning is a life of purpose, driven by vision and delivered with creativity, it has no bearing on your present conditions but is rather the Justification of sacrifices and risks.
You must strike out in faith, picking the impossible that is inline, against easy possibilities that move you out of alignment with your vision.
Creativity is how you navigate the things that are unavailable, focus is the only way to look ahead long enough for the creative options to emerge, and there is a saying so fitting, "necessity is the mother of invention".
SCATTERED OPPORTUNITIES
Another wonderful bit of distractions are scattered opportunities. Often as you try to reach your Visions, people and opportunities will emerge that flood you with options and no direction.
This is a clever trick by the world.
The beautiful bride seems to have a multiplication of suitors right when the best man appears, for reasons best known to the world, this "best" man never moves as fast as all the numerous options that are disturbing her. Often he comes with loads and responsibilities that the rest don't have. They are many, offering options and range yet none have the simple appeal that he has, "to her heart". They all make "sense" in one way or another but none fit her Visions for a man except him.
Stay focused, options and choice are the enemies of a Meaningful Life. The best has no option B.
Stay the course, see all of your Visions to a finished end. If in the end it fails, and it won't, at least you can live the rest of your life sure, without regrets.
You can flip a coin with your choice of breakfast but never with Marriage, Children, Career, Primary Residence, Spirituality, Health and Fitness, Lifestyle, Ethics, in essence the things that are destiny.
These are the core pieces of a Meaningful Life and cannot be treated like a choice between a change of clothes, in fact even how you dress should be "purposeful" as mini skirts and long gowns do not attract the same "kind" of eyes.
GREAT WISE IDEAS
I was born to some of the most intelligent people in the world. In fact my entire family and Kindred is littered with overwise.
What do you think I do with their advice? NOTHING!
Most in my own family find it incredibly insulting that I more often than not, "do my own thing".
In their wisdom, they have ideas about family, religion, enterprise and just about anything imaginable, including how to write this article. Brilliant Ideas Which I Do Not Merely Ignore But Strategically and Summarily "Reject".
I am focused on a specific vision for "my own life" , not from the modern perspective of self seeking, joy riding, youthful deviation to selfish and childish definitions of "my" , but from the perspective of recognizing the "finger print/retina/DNA" , singularity of "my" personal journey and role in the order of "all" things.
Often when people come to you with great ideas, they fail to recognize how great your "stupid imaginations are". This is because vision is not based on any realities and is often invincible to everyone except you. In fact often when you get spouses, siblings, parents or workers that seem to "see" your Vision, it isn't your Vision that they see, it is you. They see you and often see a little bit of themselves in you, this is enough for them to "believe" in you.
believing in all the other details of your often "outlandish" Visions is a little harder and often impossible because they will need "your" eyes to see what you see and that can only happen if you die or quit and the world passes your vision to someone else.
90% of activists fail when they marry and have children and get the brilliant idea that protecting their children requires being a little more careful. Often they find themselves losing every bit of themselves to "protect" their children. In the end, the society rots and one day the very kids they tried to protect become victims of the very society they failed to secure.
Great ideas make you live in Europe working on cartoons in an animation studio and failing to recognize the greatness of the contributions you could have made, to the development of local masquerades.
Great ideas make you marry the President's son, who will end up a poor reflection of his father and subject you to life with a "poor" wealthy man, at the bottom of the top of society, drinking himself to sleep every night, feeling sorry for himself in the sky lounges of global airports, this when you could have married the man with no shoes, who ends up Goodluck Jonathan.
Great ideas are only great, if they lead you to a Meaningful Life, anything less and it is a "wonderful" distraction, which by all measure is a distraction nonetheless.
What is the point of winning a Boxing match, when you're a Soccer player? What Good is a peaceful life, if you're built for war? What is the point of a great story, when the story you write is clearly not yours and simply not right? When measured with your Visions which were equally achievable, albeit with a little more effort and discomfort, in exchange for a "Meaning Full Life".
PEOPLE
The Journey to a Meaningful Life, requires a specific set of people - your people.
You find them in your family, but not always, in your Kindred, but not always, in your co-workers, employees, friends etc., but not always. However, 100% of the time they will show up, if you're on course.
Some of them are part-time, showing up at critical points in your journey to encourage or enrage you, help or cheat you, grow or trim you, all for the final good of a polished you, that can deliver your Visions to the world.
Some of them are permanent companions, whose journey resemble yours and will grace every part of your journey as contemporaries or opposition, collaborators or competition, on either side guiding your journey with their support or contest.
Your ability to see clearly what each person in your life represents is a defensive and supportive ability that cannot be neglected. It enables you to quickly run from those who represent a threat to your visions or at least prepare for their attacks and to also equally attract and retain those who are a blessing to your journey, even when they are at their nascent states of growth or when you barely know them.
People are at the foundation of all reasoning behind your Visions and people will be crucial to your ability to achieve it.
In fact much of your creativity is needed in order to "present" your visions to other "people", in a way that will allow them to have a true buy in, as partners, users or guests in the story of your Meaningful Life.
If you do not know what you want or are not "strictly" focused on them, you will overpopulate your world with enemies (as they are often first to see the efficacy of your visions, since they sit on the opposite end of it) and Underpopulated your world with Allies (since they are often blinded by their own journey and fear of past hurts, to see that you are headed in the same direction).
THINGS
There are tools you need for the journey, that can only be collected along the road. You must be focused to see them.
The road to a Meaningful Life, is filled with things, rewards, risks, tools, traps, all of which you must be aware of and able to spot, and in real time to sort to know which is which, help or trap.
Let us make it practical.
Let's imagine that you are the inventor of the Modern Airplane. Let's imagine that God/Nature gifted you with the inspiration for the modern Jet in 1850, all of the tools and technologies that will be necessary for your invention would not even exist at the time, Composite materials, Jet fuel, Turbine Engines, Computing technologies, non of these will exist and it will be up to you to spot them when you see them, to aid their development or at least integrate them into your invention.
If you are not focused and laser limited in what you will accept out of life, you will build the wooden concoctions of the "Wright brothers", because those were the readily available materials.
Focus allows you to be limited in what you will accept and this forces advanced creativity and the clarity to pick up things along the way that are specific to your destination and equally to not load up your life with unnecessary weights of tools and things that are of no use to you.
EXPERIENCES
I have learned to not learn from everything. Nigeria has been terribly disappointing to many and they have responded to it by changing. Nigeria can never disappoint me, because my Vision is to change "it" and that means that I can "never" let it change me.
When you are focused, you will know "what" to do with experiences, noting which ones to file as distractions, which to store as memories and which to record as lessons that deserve the very "rare" tweaking of your focus.
Visions can only get clearer, never tweak them, Creativity can only get better, never tame it, Focus however can take a tweaking ever so often, when you discover an experience that is meant to teach you.
For example, a man with a Vision of a Family home can never settle for a small one, never, he should not as a result of a bad experience with an ex-wife reduce the creative ideas he has about Kids and marriage, he can however adjust his focus to be better able to "love and hold" on to the wife that life provides to finish the journey with him.
The same applies to a Vision in a career in movies which limits you to Children's movies, never, ever, allow any experiences to drive you to the adult industry, but do not tame your creativity or limit them to ideas that come from the Children's movie industry, however your focus may clear up, as you move from Cartoons to scripted acting by a life cast and vice versa, as interactions and exposures "show" you new possibilities that may not have been possible, when you started.
No matter what, however, you must never alter the Vision, and for your vision to survive the turmoil and pressure of people, things and worse of them all experiences it must be supported by a laser like focus on what it is, that you are supposed to "be".
This applies to all areas of life and not just work.
YOU
You are the point.
It is because of you that I am writing this article because it is what you have to become, in the chase for your Visions, that matters more than anything else.
There is a saying that "you can't give, what you don't have".
The execution of a Meaningful Life, requires a focus on you. Focus on what you are meant to do, against all odds, pick up the people who are meant for you, the things that will help you and the experiences that will guide you. Avoid the Great ideas that are not your story, the Easy paths (Low Hanging Fruit) that are not your reward and the Scattered opportunities that are found every where but in the direction of where you are headed.
Build yourself to be the best in your field, as a father/mother, as a businessman/Politician etc., and in the process you will have so much to give to the world around you. Focus to amass a version of yourself that deserves the world of your Visions, Focus to apply your creativity in all its heat at a degree that is over powering for the challenges on the way. Focus, to stay on course and at the end of the road you will find a truck full of goodness that is made up of you and the particular peculiarities of your focused insistence on taking "this" particular path.
Now leak out, dump all that you have acquired on us. It is "this thing" that "you" can become and has become, that we do not have and cannot be.
Dump it on us and watch how open your heart becomes and how fulfilled you will be, as you float in the magnificent "airs" , of all that "we have", because of "you" and what are willing to give back, in order to have "you".
AML - SERIES PROFILE
A MEANINGFUL LIFE
the "A MEANINGFUL LIFE" series is a non Religious, Non Enterprise look at life and meaning, written with the hope of getting you to a life of pure Joy, real Happiness and Satisfaction with your own life, regardless of your faith and economic profile.
It does not intend to preach, but where necessary it will. At the end, the desired result is that from this series you will pick up the tools to give your life greater meaning, and live a more satisfying existence.
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