Just enough nectar beautiful bee!!

So, over the past month or so I have been feeling a bit down and kind of questioning whether I was on the right track or I was making the right decisions or not. You know, when you have an idea of what you want to do with your life, things become a bit hard. You have to be a bit more focused than when you didn’t know. Everything you do must work towards accomplishing the 1 thing you want to do. Right? Wrong.

For the longest time I was beating myself up about being “scattered” all over the place, doing this and that. Like right now, all I want to do is take pictures and bake. I have not bought a proper camera for myself as yet, but I have started towards that and the pictures are coming in. I started feeling like I just start things and never finish, I was feeling really bad about the other ideas or plans I had made, some of which I had started working on. Then this morning as I was reading around on the net, I came across a very interesting blog and post that totally liberated me. The greatest illustration and lesson I walk away with from that blog post was that painted by the writer about a bee’s visit to a flower. Well, she didn’t call it that, but I’m kind of making it my own, so I will write it like me. She says in life and with things we do, we do them to get what we want, and once we have gotten what we came for, we ought to leave. Already get where we are going with the bee? I will spell it out either way. Imagine you are watching a bee fly towards a flower, determined to get nectar. Once the bee reaches the flower it sits on it and starts sucking up as much nectar from the flower as he can. Two minutes later, the bee leaves the flower, and bewildered you think, noooooo, the bee shouldn’t leave, it must remain on the flower and suck up some more nectar. To your best ability you try and steer the bee towards the flower (I hope no one does this), there is still so much more nectar on the flower, and the bee has the potential to draw out some more, why is it leaving? You scream and shout, but against all your efforts, the bee flies off.  Sound familiar?

  Maybe let’s bring this closer home. Sometimes people around us begin great endeavours and exploits that we think may change the world. We urge these people on and we applaud from the sideways as we watch history in the making. The next thing we know, the protagonist in our great history story is not interested anymore, they want out. And we, seeing the great potential this person had, we try by all means to encourage them to stay, tell them not to leave before their breakthrough. Is that more familiar than the bee? Well, it’s the same principle really. Often we find that, even though the bee or the history maker has gotten what they had come for, onlookers often want them to stay longer. The sad thing about this is that it is done in the name of encouraging people to live out their full potential and out of a place of love. And sadly, there are people who stay on and they never get to explore beyond that one flower or.

It’s great to identify potential in people, but where it becomes deadly is when we try to chain people to just one thing because we have seen their potential there.  There have been so many people in my life who have been well meaning, but were also likely to clip my wings before I started to fly if I had listened to them. I would have been in jobs I wanted nothing to do with, cities that sucked the life out of me, perhaps even in relationships that stifled me.
So, don’t ever feel tied to something just because you started it , if you don’t want to do it anymore or you have got what you came for stick around, fly off to the next flower beautiful bee. Your potential is multifaceted, has many characteristics that may die if you try to compound it all into just one thing. Explore and live out.

On an oasis

“The grass is always greener on the other side”. This is a statement that has driven the aspirations and dreams of many a people.

I have seen people standing on grass that is greener than green, but society has taught that there is a patch somewhere that makes their green appear pink, or maybe like chaff. I look and see a place where so many would love to dance and paint canvasses that have never been perceived and grow trees that give birth to fruits never imagined, but people still don’t see this, they still run after the greener patch.

 Perhaps you too have believed this, perhaps you have been standing looking around and never where you are. Have you ever thought that maybe you are standing on an oasis? That maybe, just maybe, around you there is no grass but water and sand. Maybe all your life you have been trying to get to the greener side, but there is no other side, you are standing on an oasis. Instead of wanting to move to the other side, which most likely is just fictional, then maybe you should start looking down instead of around. Allow yourself to see the oasis you are standing on and start cultivating it.

What if the patch of grass we are standing on is the only patch there is for us to stand on. What if our feet are the perfect fit for the patch we are on, and all we need to do is make the patch comfortable and make it bloom. Maybe we need a new set of eyes; eyes that will make us see and believe that the other side might not be ours, that the greenery we see on the other person needs not be ours.

Maybe we were all created to remain on an oasis and not an avenue. Even so, be it an oasis or an avenue, keep to your patch.

This is just a loud thought!!!

Fail to fear or fear to fail….

Wow, it has been such a long while since I have been here, but I must say, it has been a good time away, getting some wisdom and knowledge (even if I say so myself).

In the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about a lot of things. The one thing that would not leave my mind though was failure. Failure, simply defined is “a lack of success in or at something”. This definition got me thinking and helped me to see and understand this daunting word and phenomenon in a completely different light. I had often heard people say that failure is necessary, but I never would agree.

See, for someone who has never experienced failure, the latter may not be as fearsome as it had been for me. Thing is, when I was in grade 9, I spent the whole year in class, daily doing my homework and writing every test there was. I did all my assignments and handed them in on time. Anyone who knows me will know that, especially in my younger youth, I loved to sleep, so I counted every minute and hour that I spent preparing for school instead of sleeping. Well, there was one thing that I could sacrifice my sleep for, and that was reading…anything but my school books. When asked to do a book review, I read 5 books so that I could choose which one I thought I could do justice and get a good review on.

Anyway, getting back to the point, in that year, like every other year, I expected that my natural wit would see me through to the next grade. I was always fortunate in that I never had to put in any work, I would get good grades without even trying. But this year was different. Like I said, I did everything I had done previously, but when the time came for the final exam reports, I was informed that I had failed. Noone in my family believed it, of course I also didn’t. I spent the rest of my high school career waiting to be told that they had made a mistake and that I would be pushed up by a grade….and today, 16 years later, I am still waiting.

At that stage in my life, failure was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I blamed everything I could. By that I mean I blamed my teachers, they had marked my papers wrong, hence I failed. Well, that’s what I believed, I’m not sure what I believe now, lol. Going back to what I said about the rumour I heard on how failure was necessary, I now look back at my life and the year I had to repeat a grade. I now realise that indeed THAT failure was necessary. Was it good then? NOT! Did I enjoy it? Certainly NOT! But if you were to ask me if I learnt anything from it, I will tell you most DEFINITELY yes!! Having failed, and this not only referring to a class, but a lot of other experiences in life, I can say that failure is necessary. Failure opened my eyes to the fact that life goes on even if things do not work out how I had planned or anticipated. Because of this, I have learnt to take chances and risks. I am not afraid to make mistakes, because I know that even if I do, life still goes on. After failure, I now know that I can pick myself up wiser and greater and go on. See, a lot of people in life can say that they don’t fail. Granted! But I have also realised that a lot of these people who never fail are those who are always “playing it safe”. People who never fail are often those who never take chances, those who are so self-centred and fearful of “what will people think/say” that they don’t ever get to do anything. These are the kind of folk who will choose the easiest option, which most of the time means they are selling themselves short. As much as I hate using generalisations, I can’t say this without generalising. Forgive me, but I’m not sorry.

Usually, those who are scared to fail are those who have not the ability to laugh at themselves, which by the way, I think is one of the greatest characteristics to have in life. The ability to laugh at yourself opens you up to endless possibilities and enables you to knock on doors that may get slammed in your face; doors that most people would never go knocking on because of fear. You go knocking so that even if all goes wrong, at least you walk away knowing that you had tried. Unlike the person who stands at a distance and watch you do life and laughs at your downfalls and failures. This person will never do life; they will always watch life go by, because they have pride without even realising it. Even God says He honours the humble and despises the proud.

Am I saying you must yourself up to fail? No. All I am saying is that we should be able to do all that we want and desire, not being held back by the fear of falling or failing. Will we fail? Maybe we will maybe we won’t, but there is no way we can know without taking risks and putting ourselves out there. Live your life with no fears but the reverent fear of God, because after all, He already knows when and where you will fail. He has made provision to counsel, comfort and encourage you to go on and be the best He has created you to be.

 So, having said all of this, all I am really saying is: do not fear to fail, if you do, you cripple yourself. If you fear to fail, you become the stumbling block to your potential. Fear to fail will cause you to never reach the best you could; if only you tried.