Whether your deepest ambitions are mundane or high-minded, it’s a well-known axiom that to manifest your goal, you’ll require “enlistment”—which means taking the simple steps of writing it down, planning your work, and working your plan.
Without the blueprint, it is said you’re little more than a rudderless ship on an angry sea, hapless and helplessly tossed about with precious little chance of arriving at your chosen destination.
All well and good, yet I’d like to suggest a more effortless approach. The wisest among us say we cannot arrive at the answers we seek without asking the right questions. So I ask—are you asking the right questions?
I have a friend who often says it isn’t people who have all the answers she finds interesting, but the ones who know which questions to ask. Big difference!
I’m guessing you know which questions you’re asking, and more often than not, you believe they are the right ones. Yet if there is more you would seek from the world, let one of those questions be this: Am I asking the right questions?
This circuitous logic reminds me of an obfuscating discourse once offered by a Pentagon official: “We know what we know, and we know what we don’t know. But there are also things we don’t know that we know, and things we don’t know that we don’t know.”
Somewhere in that method is a departure from the madness, if we only knew it.
When I was a strapping young lad of eighteen, my father glared at me and asked “What have you done for mankind?” I was flummoxed.I hardly knew what he meant, much less how to respond.
Today, I see how his question has shaped my entire life and it’s a question I continue to ask myself on a regular basis. Hand in hand with that question is another I often ask myself, and now I ask you: How do you measure your life?
Please, think not in terms of the monuments you have built to yourself, but in how you have touched the people in your world. Answer not in terms of how you were celebrated and remunerated for your efforts, but in what you shared, person to person, on an individual level. What have you given those in your life? Have you used your inborn gifts to make a difference in the world?
Now you’re asking the right questions. Remarkably, these are the questions that lead to the fulfillment of your own aspirations, goals and dreams.
If it sounds all too bleeding-heart, namby-pamby, airy-fairy for you, consider this… the objective of every business interest in the world is the very same. Business prospers from free market enterprise, which roughly means this: find a need and fill it. Give people what they want, and they willingly respond with what you ask from them.
In Hermetic terms, it goes like this: What goes around, comes around. Scientifically: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In terms of personal growth: Share my gifts with the world, and I create a better world in which to live.
From that better world comes the enrichment you seek-be it financial, fitness related, romantic or otherwise. And never forget that everything you ask for is within you now, residing in your heart, in the dream of passion and fulfillment, thoughtfully put there by an unconditional and benevolent source.
To discover the answers you seek is to know which questions to ask. I ask that you remember yourself in the coming days, and endeavor to create the world you most want to be part of.
Love and light to you –
Peter