YES! “SHE” SPEAKS

“Do not try to run away from trials and tribulations, but endure them with patience. They cannot be avoided, and there is nothing for it but to endure them with patience. How can you expect the whole of this world, and all that has been created therein, to undergo change and transformation just to suit your convenience? The Prophets are the best of all creatures, yet they have always had to suffer afflictions and so it is for their followers, those who tread in their footsteps as they walk along their highway, emulating their example.”

I am sure that many of us are now moving on in our lives, moving past things that may seem rather different to how we may have planned. Needlesstosay, different seems frightening but nonetheless equally stimulating. I mean who wants to live the same life, same job, same thoughts, and same opinions.

Invariably life is such, things change, amend and alter and we change accordingly. As many question and challenge their future plans and their choice in studies, others continue studying something they hate with vengeance, lucky ones attend lectures with passion, love and intellectual stimulation which builds hope for the future.

Whatever our situation may be, our road map is still in our hands, for some of us who think that tolerating one’s studies is suffice and enough of a reason to continue, let me tell you now, it really isn’t! I personally do not wish to merely “tolerate” my studies, field of studies or my future for that matter. It takes a little more than a kind of sullen tolerance, a passive form of hostility, a shaky truce.

It is the quality of true engagement with every aspect of our lives, including our education, of which Malcolm X once referred to as “our passport to the future.” How can we attain passion for a field that we cannot even begin to appreciate. Surely if we cannot be bothered to turn up to our lectures, there’s no hope of us ever turning up to work, or putting a skill that we cannot be bothered to learn into practice.

For some of us deriving this passion will take a lot more than just turning up to lectures, it is only through deep thought and contemplation that we as students are able to identify the true value of our studies, and really there is no point of studying something you hate. If you hate to learn about it, what hope is there for its practice. There’s a good old saying that if you pick a field that you love, you will never have to work a day in your lifetime.

Let me illustrate a problem of my own I’ve always mastered the excuse “I’m tired, I have no energy,” I have always used this excuse as a defense mechanism to excuse myself from studies, until someone very wise once said: “If you loved the book you were reading, you wouldn’t be tired, you’d be stocked up on energy.” And that my friend is so true, ironies upon ironies. It’s funny how I would use my lack of energy as a defense mechanism and at that point in time get my ultimate favorite book and read it until my eyes would drop, actually it would drop and I’d go and flush my face with water so I could finish the book. And then it occurred to me, imagine if I had to read the books I love in my studies and it was embodied in every thing I did.

Again, I don’t want to merely tolerate my studies, I want to thrive for it, strive for it and want it in every possible sense. It is this active and open-mind to what fascinates us at the deeper level, through both our phenomenal commonality and our dazzling individuality that enables us to affirm what we want to do with our lives and how we wish to welcome the future. And it is quality of active engagement with oneself that distinguishes our thoughts, our zeal and our destiny.

Einstein once passionately argued: “Education is what remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” It’s taken me a while to actually understand the idea; it certainly is food for a thought. The challenge before us is to go beyond the babble of our insecurities, fear of incompetence, instability in change etc. Just because you feel comfortable in a field, or you know your stuff it doesn’t mean you have passion for it. It is up to us to think and ponder over what steps we wish to take, discover what we want, the universal principles of loving what you’re doing rather than just doing it for the sake of doing it.

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