The bible speaks of how we are just a vapor and we vanish away, for we do not know what will happen tomorrow and how our time on earth is but a mist that appears for a short while.
So many of us live life as if we have all the time in the world. We live without care, plan and urgency. Always thinking that “one day I will…”. Yet never realizing that one might not happen, time will creep up on you and before you know it ,it’s 20 years later and that “one day” has already passed.
On the other hand, a handful of people live with such an urgency to make that one day a reality as soon as possible, to follow their dreams and achieve their goals that they forget to enjoy the process of the journey that when their one day finally comes, it is but an empty achievement because they never stopped to smell the flowers and enjoy the journey.
I live on both spectrum's of this phenomenon. I am so goal driven and ambitious that I am impatient to get to the “finish” line, hoping that there is a pot of gold waiting for me on the other side, but at the same time I am also oftentimes waiting for something to magically happen in order to achieve something. More money, being fitter, traveling more or moving to a different place you name it.
One thing that I have learned from both my impatience and procrastination is that they both stem from fear.
We are impatient because we compare ourselves to others, thinking that we should have already achieved something bigger in life, yet forgetting that our journeys, opportunities and dreams are all different. We procrastinate because we are scared of failure, what others may think and just simply do not have the confidence in ourselves, believing that we aren’t actually good enough.
Only when we stop looking to the left and right of us when we finally find peace with the journey that we are in. When it stops being a race to an imaginary finish line we finally find contentment to not only be open to failure, but embrace it and learn from it. Within this peace we learn what dreams truly are ours and we no longer chase those of our parents or society but we finally learn what we want, what we want to give and leave behind.
“Be patient for things to happen, but at the same time work relentlessly to make them happen”
- AO Nel
