When you go off tangents and miss the bull’s eye.

We all have plans, we plan a wedding, a birthday party, how to start a new business, how to achieve some requisite targets, plans on resolutions and so on and so forth. Some managers believe in the management by objective mantra. When you lay down a plan you can only be optimistic, you can never say you plan to fail. But then again failure at times is inevitable… we plan to save, to buy a house and just when you are about to make the deposit a more urgent need arises, maybe your business needs supplies, you have a hospital bill to settle distractions could be many. But are we prepared for failure, are ever prepared on what to do when those very plans do not materialize? Can you say that you are?

That is why today I would like you and me to start thinking about that probability of failure instead of fire fighting every time things go wrong. I have been there many times, I usually make plans but as every optimist would, I shave off all those bad elements ignore them even when they are glaring at me. We all are culprits of counting the chicks in the eggs we carry, only to realize that some of them are bad or they end up as omelette and we forget we wanted them to hatch in the first place.

If you steal my diary you will find a thousand and one to do list, same with emails, things that need to be replied to or worked on, I have dates I never go to, and some promises that are on the verge of breaking. I know you’ll tell me to be a man of my word, but at times that is so freaking hard, you start off well but on the way you find so many places you could should visit or some potential better ways emerge which are might lead you to that dead end and you lose the cause even before you know it…

Today I didn’t feel like writing anything, until I remembered having this debate about goals and veering off tangents to miss the bull’s eye with my cousin, do you start blaming yourself, others, God or do you just learn and move on? I will avoid being verbose and ask you, what do you do when you take on a tangent off your goal? Are you even prepared for it?

 

Compliments of a friend.

Today I was going through my old notes and came across this poem by Ogden Nash, and I feel it best describes melancholy we fall into once in a while…

How many gifted pens have penned
That Mother is a boys best friend!
How many more like afflatus
Award the do that honoured status!
I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers
If I belittle dogs or Mothers,
But gracious, how can I agree?
I know my own best friend is me.
We share our joys and aversions,
We’re thicker than the Medes and Persians,
We blend like voices in a chorus,
The same things please the same things bore us.
If I am broke, then Me needs money;
If I make a joke, Me finds it funny.
I know what I like, Me knows what art is:
We hate people at the cocktail parties,
When I can stand the crowd no more,
Why, me is halfway to the door!
I am a dodo, Me a hawk;
We grieve that pictures learned to talk;
For every sin that I produce
Kind Me can find some soft excuse,
And when I blow a final gasket,
Who but me will share the my casket?
Beside us, Pythias and Damon
Were just two unacquainted laymen.
Sneer not, for if you answer true,
Don’t you feel that way about YOU?

 

The darkest hours.

Sometimes we fall so we learn to stand up again, are broken in order to be made whole again. And fall is what I have, but break, I am not sure I can take…
You see, this makes me keep on asking questions, hard questions, some without answers, heck I even had uncertainties. But then again why is it that there can’t be peace unless you’ve known blood been through war or a fight, know success unless you’ve been through failure, can’t appreciate love unless you’ve borne a heartbreak???? Think about it, even a kite experiences its greatest heights when it goes against the wind as Sir Winston Churchill once put it. But why is it that you have to go through thorns to pluck a rose petal? Why can’t it be thornless, why?

But is it true that with every struggle there comes a better day, with every dark night the sun still shines??? Those who fight for emancipation do so on the fickle promise of hope. I am not sure how faith plays in the desire to realize something hoped for, maybe you can help me there…
As I try to disabuse my mind of the prejudices hiding therein, I can only hope that after all the thorny paths, bad experiences one can truly find true emancipation and it is not an abyss without that light at the end of it…