Life is a race against death,
Don't let your life slip away,
Without embracing it with your fullest passion.
Live and celebrate each day as if,
It is the only day you have.
(After all, none of us are likely to predict,
Which day will be our last.)
There is beauty in even the smallest things,
My Beta fish who has been living with me,
For a year and a half.
I call him -- 'Nietzsche'.
My 'Super-Beta-Fish'.
Each day is both a blessing and a challenge.
If we view each day as a curse,
Then we are doing something wrong,
And we need to do something different.
Make the most of this 'daily blessing'.
And meet each challenge head on.
Choose a project that is important to you.
A project that has meaning for you.
And embrace this project with your fullest passion.
Invest yourself in the project -- totally.
Meet this project with,
Preparation, courage, energy, effort, and action,
Fueled by your internal fire and excitement.
Anxiety is the flipside of excitement.
I learned this from Gestalt Therapy.
(Anxiety is where you start to focus,
On what you have to 'lose',
Rather than on what you have to 'win'.)
Don't let anxiety stop you in your tracks,
And derail you from pushing on with your project.
As well, don't let small mistakes or failures,
Discourage you from your goals.
Not even large mistakes or large failures.
Learn from them.
Make the necessary adjustments and compensations,
And move on.
Encourage yourself, support yourself.
Even when all others have jumped off your bandwagon,
Reward yourself for your small successes,
Let these small successes,
Energize you,
And thrust you forward.
Through the trenches and the mud,
Through the hard times,
Through the rain, the sleet, the snow.
Keep plugging on...
Keep attuned to what your project needs from you,
In the here and now, moment to moment,
One step at a time,
And don't get lost in your abstractions,
Or get bogged down,
Instead, let others feel your excitement,
And share it with you.
Push aside all visions of failure,
Just stick to your concrete goals and tasks,
And don't look up til it's time to take a break.
Don't give up,
And never say 'never'.
The worst thing you can say to yourself is,
'I didn't work hard enough to accomplish,
What I wanted to do.
I didn't work hard enough,
To be who I wanted to be.'
In this regard,
Eliminate the word 'try' from your vocabulary,
'Dont' try, just do!'
'Trying' is too often an internal admission of,
Expected failure,
A self-fulfiling prophecy of 'non-committment',
To your task at hand,
Of not wanting to do, what you say you want to do.
Of not wanting to do the work to get you,
To where you need to go.
If the task is important to your larger goals,
Then don't 'try', just do!
Eliminate all excuses from your repertoire.
And 'will your way' to greater and greater successes.
Then at different 'success-points' along the way,
And especially when you finally,
Reach the end of your project,
When you are significantly happy,
With what you have accomplished,
Take up your champaigng glass, or glass of wine,
At the end of the day,
Preferrably in the company of someone you deeply care about,
And who deeply cares about you,
And say,
I -- or we -- did what we wanted to do.
-- dgb, undated, approximately 1999, updated, Mar. 26th, 2009.
