4 Obstacles
We all need to be aware of our personal calling.
What is a personal calling?
It is God’s blessing, it is the path that God chose for
you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we
are following our legend. However, we don’t all have the courage to confront
our own dream.
Why?
There are four obstacles.
First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is
impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do
the layers of prejudice, fear, and guilt. There comes a time when our personal
calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it’s still
there.
If
we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second
obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those
around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not
realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us
going forward. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us
to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.
Once
we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle:
fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer
far more when it doesn’t work out, because we cannot fall back on the old
excuse; “Oh well, I didn’t really want it anyway.” We do want it and know that
we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal calling is no
easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this
journey. Then, we warriors of light must
be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the universe
is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how.
The waterfront next to the tallest building in the world in Dubai, United Arab Emirates |
I ask myself: are defeats necessary?
Well,
necessary or not, they happen. When we first begin fighting for our dream, we
have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to
fall seven times and to get up eight times.
So why is it so important to live our personal calling
if we are only going to suffer more than other people?
Because,
once we have overcome the defeats—and we always do—we are filled by a greater
sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we
are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is
part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense,
unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently
bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at
our soul, until, one day we are no longer able to free ourselves from the
bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.
Having
disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent
many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted
is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth
obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.
Oscar
Wilde said: “Each man kills the thing he loves most.” And it’s true. The mere
possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with
guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they truly want
and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all
the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering our hearts endured, all the things
we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who,
when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series
of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal—when it was only a step away.
This
is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura
about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of
the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you
help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.
The sunset behind my house in Gobojango, Botswana -Paulo Coelho (preface to The Alchemist) |
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