Don’t Buckle Under Pressure
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In life Pressure could be identified as an opposing force which tries to push you astray from your vision in life. Pressure is the natural force that obstructs your desires in life. Pressure can appear in many forms. Such as as financial pressure where you find yourself incapacitated in front of the commitments you have in life, pressure arousing from family issues, pressure at the work place as a result of demanding situations, misbehavior of your children or parental issues may all be part of what lets you down in life. You and I are called upon to step upwards and move forward, not to step backwards. Which means we are called to be victorious and not failures.
None of us want to stagnate in the inferior state where we were couple of years ago. If you allow pressure to control you, it will buckle you from taking a step ahead. No one will be able to run at their actual speed if their feet are chained. If you are buckled up you can’t run fast. We all have witnessed infants buckle before they start to walk. Also, only if a vessel is empty it could be filled with finest oils to its fullest potential, if it is partly filled with waste, then it cannot be filled to its utmost with finest oils. In that way the vessel will not be able to serve the original purpose that it was made for. While you are cycling at free flow, if you come across a deep hole in the road, you may cycle over it and fall, if you weren’t completely focusing on the road and the bicycle whilst cycling.
This is why I always encourage parents to train their children to focus on one activity at a time. I am in contradiction with people reading books while listening to music and munching a burgher. Some may call it “wow” and label such a person as a multitasker. It may be true that it’s a talent but moreover it is an ineffective talent. As their mind will never be able to fathom the ultimate knowledge or understand the content of the book, nor will their taste buds feel the taste of the burger to its fullest, neither will their ears be able to attain the complete pleasure of the music, because they are fragmented. This is exactly what pressure can do to you. It deviates you from your original vision.
When I was studying CIM-UK, I was having high hopes of becoming the best in the country. However, I still remember myself not being able to recall anything which I tried to study. So many negative thoughts encamped me and I was pressurised by the thought that my previous affiliation with dangerous drugs, has destroyed my memory cells. I kept on challenging those fears and I never seized study, I rather challenged those fears by studying more and more, especially when those pressurising feelings crept over me. Ultimately I became the best Sri Lankan student at the final stage of CIM-UK. An exceptional feet I’ve never really heard been achieved by an ex-druggist or a person who was once a beggar in the streets.
If you permit the pressures in life to master over you, then you will lose your aptitude to innovate or recreate. Innovation and recreation takes place with constant and continuous investment of time and focus on a single idea. Thomas Alva Edison was pondering, fantasising and living on innovating the bulb. There was no vacant space within his mind for anything else. Pressure actually consumes your capacity to invest on creativity. If you become the master over those pressures then you will witness an amazing outcome amidst the pressures, but if you let pressure to take control over you, not only will it defocus you, but it will also destroy your creativity by sucking your positive energy and diverting it towards unnecessary battles.
We must have a precise understanding of the field that we are battling. Unfortunately, many people battle in the wrong field. You should be wise enough to compile all your energy towards your vision and not towards fighting an unwanted battle. You will not be able to teach your children with your fullest capacity, if you are watching a drama whilst teaching them. If you are more focused on the drama then you might end up teaching your children a few words from the drama instead of what’s in their books.
Pressures are indeed opportunities. Therefore, you must train your mind to see the pressure in life as opportunities that you are granted in order to grow, rather than seeing them as obstacles that exists to hold you back. You can’t avoid these pressures as they are a part of the parcel. Just as comfortability, pressure will also continue to be a part of your life until you leave this world. So, learn and train yourself to select, ignore and challenge the pressures you face in life. Learn to walk through the battle, not to walk around it and escape it. Pressures are indeed opportunities.
Just think for a moment, if you train to run hard in the beach with sand bags in your calves, one day you will be able to run in the race track, very comfortably at your fullest speed. Likewise, if you are living next to an industrial factory with a lot of noise, but you manage to train your mind to study amidst those noises, your mind will advance to a different level enhancing the capacity of your mind. As you know gold is not found from the soil in its commercial version, but ones it’s been subjected to a process of purification with a lot of burning, it starts to turn in to shining gold. That’s why they say “Grind Today and Shine Tomorrow”.
Pressure and Peace are two diverse states of mind, but if you mature yourself to master the pressures you are going to have peace amidst pressure. Let go of the pressures which are irrelevant to your battle. We all have our own dramas in life, and we should never get into other people’s dramas. Let them handle their dramas while you handle yours. When you become well trained in handling pressure, it becomes a day to day routine workout then you will continue to move upward and forward amidst the tough pressure. When I started the second chapter of my life, all I had was a tattered twenty rupee note in the pocket of my ragged blue jeans. In faith I decided to walk after what I believed and I never stopped listening to the sideline voices. I trained my mind to focus solely on my vision. Train your inner voice to come out louder and sharper than all the other sideline voices, so that you will never deviate from your original vision.