Beware The Enemy Within

I have a couple of analogies to kick off this article; and they are this way:

Everyone is in detent with what happens in the physical world as opposed to what happens in the mental world or natural law.

We all understand that a baby will begin by learning how to turn itself whilst on the floor, then crawl on all fours, stand, walk, and eventually run. Right?

When it comes to the mental world; everyone wants to skip levels and do the equivalent of a baby running in the physical world. We know and do find it obvious that objects left suspended and unsupported in the air fall to the ground. Including the fact that water is wet!

And we also understand that;

When a car was invented, there weren’t so many rules on the road as they are at this present time. As the vehicle population grew, so did the accidents, which required and commanded an exponential increase in the rules and laws of the road. These rules and laws are there to curb the enemy that emerges when left unchecked and not in order; because in their absence, chaos is the order of the day. Right?

We have seen rules and laws in the aviation industry, trains, submarines and bicycles, even communities, businesses and countries have rules, laws and constitutions, whichever is applicable, upon which to function and achieve purpose.

This is the orderly flow of nature, there is no way of truncating that and we all respect and understand that.

And how about YOU!

Are you one of the incandescent individuals, lamenting in angst that despite reading mountains of motivational articles and books for years, you still cannot seem to get the efficacies right? Or that the motivation is ephemeral?

Here is my observation... when you find yourself in a hole; the first thing to do is to stop digging! And when standing still or going backwards, the best person to know what is happening and understand the reason is you. But half the time the reason is not known anyway, and all we are saying is check your rules; rules = (principles, values, morals and ethics) = “ideals”

So to recap, when we were younger than we are, traffic of responsibility was far much lesser than we have known. Now that the traffic has increased, we can curb mayhem by consciously introducing strong ideals, and rest assured the enemy within is subjugated.

It is not everyone in this impasse, but to those who keep on going back to old habits and find themselves ephemerally motivated. This is for you...

There is nothing wrong with motivational books and articles, but everything wrong with our choices. The reason is simple, we all make our choices basing on our ideals and if they are not clear, we are basically shooting in the dark. This is the reason my articles being submitted are evolving around the subject of ideals. So many books and articles assume that we have our foundation on solid ground, and that all we need is to construct an edifice on a pre-defined strong base, “of a foundation we already have”.

The ideals we hold, knowingly or unknowingly are the basis on which we inadvertently create the enemy within. Ideals are also the driving force for the choices we make, therefore, are cardinal to success.

There can never be a vacuum of ideals nor an individual devoid of ideals. It is either you consciously know the ideals that you hold or unconsciously do not know the ideals you hold; in which case, I’d liken this to a back garden.  

If you do not care about cultivating, trimming and laying out your ideals, you’ll find the exact equivalent in your mind of what you’d encounter in your unattended back garden. Anything can come out of those tall weeds, a snake can come out and do you harm. So nurture you thoughts with laid out, trimmed principles and by so doing avoid springing surprises. So understand that either way, the mind has to translate to the equivalent in the physical world of that which you hold in your mental faculty. It shall surely bring forth.

So why is it that despite knowing that our ideals are cardinal to our success, majority of people never take the time to clearly define them?

It is human nature to shun that which is befitting and beneficial to one’s own purpose. If what you set out doing does not come out right, you have to move to an era where you are called upon to raise certain basic questions about whether an edifice which produces fear, de-motivation and failure must not be restructured and refurbished.

Your thought edifice can only be refurbished and restructured by clearly defining your ideals [principles, values, ethics and morals]. By so doing, we avoid preparing ourselves to gamble with disaster.

But alas, beware of the enemy within yourself! Lest, we end up crying with the Apostle Paul; when he said ‘the good that I would, that I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.’ We cry out with Saint Augustine as he said in his confessions, ‘Lord, make me pure, but not yet.’ Or we end up having to say with Goethe that ‘there’s enough stuff in me to make either a gentleman or a rogue.’

That’s the tension at the heart of human nature. It is not so much of ability but the ‘will’ that one must and will define one’s own ideals.