When Your Ideals Are Threatened

When you crash and burn at your first attempt working a project that cost every muscle in your body to put together, same one everybody around you felt different about, you feel the white-hot glares of scorn peel through layers of your skin like sun rays through a hundred lenses incinerating an entire colony of black ants. The only difference is this beam is sucking on your faith, seeping out your very life-force. Do you marvel how fear of failure cripples the desire to venture out into strange waters? It makes us long for support from our peers. In any case, there isn't a single thread of fault with folks sharing their dreams and aspirations with other people. The principle thing is not to leave the door too wide open so a desire for companionship morphs into a ruthless dependency; a belief we are nothing without someone else's opinion.

Courtesy: Naja Niketa

The quest to achieve is an inseparable element of every man’s psyche; a burden to increase and multiply. To excel in a chosen field, an area of interest. And thus, fear on any level should be kept on a tight leash. I have come to terms with my weaknesses. Not compromise. I have studied and garnered ample info from my shortcomings, and I understand the limits of my abilities and strengths. I cannot deny the fact that I’m inclined to make mistakes or that the best of my pains might fall through like a castle erected on sand. Nevertheless, my calling raises me up high above all limitations and plants my feet on a pedestal of sweet possibilities. And I am persuaded to declare this privileged position in which I have found myself fortifies the essence of my zeal. Faith can stand, walk, run and fly incontestable even when evidence indicates the contrary.

I stay my course trailing my own path. Besides, shaping a life is an individual responsibility. Dexterity in the mental realm and otherwise, cannot be taken out of the equation. We are heroes of what we pursue and conquer but not before we conquer nor even before we lay pursuit. Until we tread less traveled paths, experience can only be measured by a stretch of imagination like a paradise possessed from a distance. The haunting knowingness that I might walk away from the life I was programmed to multiply agitates my creativity. I sense a threat to my very existence every time I am reminded I am surrounded by opposition.

“All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.”—Maya Angelou.

And that’s why I keep a simple creed but fire it up to get me through the heat.

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan