The Real Test!

We always talk about personal development and how to improve oneself, but how many of us actually abide to what we say? Well the answer is hardly any of us, which is probably why we always go back talking about improving ourselves, because really, if you think about it, we don’t change. We just accept we are how we are.

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
―Elizabeth Gilbert.

This quote reminded me of a story we read and discussed at the first Abhyaas Varg. I’d say fictional story as it seemed so surreal and well… pretty fictional, but then actually, we can all relate to it. The so-called ‘perfect’ world was similar to ours. We know the wrong meaning of happiness. Our happiness is only temporary.

‘The ones who walk away from the Omelas’ describes a perfect non-materialistic town where the whole population is ‘happy’… everyone apart from a small child suffering. If this child wasn’t suffering, the rest of the town would not be able to be ‘happy’. The test the people had to face was to either accept this compromise, ignore the poor state the child was in and carry on living this ‘happy’ life or to take a stand, walk away from the situation and do something better than just accepting this ‘happy’ life.

In the same way, participating in SIP so far has got me thinking that this is the real test. We will always have personal constraints, whether it is family and social commitments or concentration on studies. However, SIP has opened up an opportunity to actually stand up and improve with the power to actually do so.

So the real test has begun, from the project I want to succeed in obviously to our individual daily and weekly targets. Will I actually be able to do something to change? Or will I fail and just go back to accepting how we all are and not do something about it? Let’s See!