All of this week’s offering is plagiarised... well maybe, copied... or maybe simply inspired, by someone else... but is made up of some of the most impressionable philosophers, homespun and professional, ever. In their words you may find comfort, strength, support, or encouragement.
Take them lightly or seriously... your choice, but if only one word resonates, I will feel a ‘different’ kind of message has been worthwhile.
Steve Jobs may, or may not have been a workaholic, and while his squillions ensure that whatever he says will be heard, has a message for every youthful generation saying, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t live according to someone else’s dogma, the rules by which they live, because it means that you are living according to someone else’s thinking, wasting your own imagination.” These sentiments are very much echoed by James Cameron, director of the ‘Titanic,’ and ‘Avatar’ movies, who told a graduating student cohort, “Set your goals high, and whether you succeed or fail you will always be a winner. Aiming high and failing is a personal victory, a triumph over those whose goals are always achievable, and achieve only mediocrity.”
Nelson Mandela lived a life of such intensity, such pain, and suffering, particularly when he was imprisoned on Robben Island, for 18 years. Every day he must have looked across the five miles of shark infested Southern Atlantic Ocean towards his beloved Cape Town with an incredibly heavy heart, yet with enough resilience to write, “The greatest glory lies not in never falling, but rising every time we fall.” Indeed, he showed sufficient mental and physical strength to inspire the end of apartheid, and for the name Mandela to be immortalised. Ironically, many years before Mandela’s imprisonment, convict David Stuurman actually escaped from the island in 1809, and upon being returned to his cell four months later, stayed patient and escaped again in 1820, so perhaps he too provided some inspiration for Mandela’s social and political successes.
We can’t all be winners, can we? Despite the old No Fear sports clothing message that, “Second place is the first loser,” there has always been a special place in our hearts for truly ‘unlucky losers,’ hasn’t there? Who can ever forget Devon Loch, owned by the Queen Mother Elizabeth I, going 5 lengths clear in the closing stages of the 1956 Grand National Steeplechase, when, ridden by Dick Francis, he slipped and fell just 40 meters from glory, perhaps inspiring Francis to write fictional racing stories. Until today, royalty still awaits that elusive Grand National winner, while ironically maybe, even religion has an opinion, with the biblical proverb (14:20), ‘An unlucky loser is shunned by all, but everyone loves a winner.
“Life,” said John Lennon, “is what happens when you are busy making plans,” and certainly there is that often quoted adage that ‘Man plans, while God laughs,’ if you ever wanted a sobering reminder that life never really goes exactly as we would wish.
There are just too many intangibles, too many things that we don’t know, and too many things that we don’t have any control over for any level of certainty. In fact the wisest Oriental philosopher, Confucius is reputed to have said that, “Life is really simple, we just insist upon making it complicated, which probably isn’t a hundred miles away from the truth, if one is possible, about life. However, being a bit of an old romantic myself... I appreciate Hans Christian Andersen’s description of life as “the most wonderful fairy tale.”
I’m still uncertain about how my, and our, ‘fairy tales’ will work out, and strangely, I don’t think that when my story ‘ends,’ it truly will. Have a think about this. You have watched a movie, and at the finish you get up and walk out with the crowd... what are you thinking about. Yep... what happened after the movie ended... and such is life.
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