Day 03: What Drives your Life?

The man without a purpose is like a sheep without a rudder - a waif, a nothing, a no man.
-Thomas Carlyle

Guilt. I am a captive of my past, imprisoned in a self-imposed cauldron of regrets and shame. They stuck on my memory. And I have grown accustomed playing them back on my head over and over. They have already emaciated me to the point of immunity.

Resentment & Anger. I have hold on to several grudges. Entertaining them has become some sort of a recreational activity. I resent my circumstances. I resent the fact that I cannot grasp everything. And it was I who’s often deeply cut, wandering in the unbearable.

Fear. I have stayed long overdue between the walls of my cot. I have always wanted to break-free. Yet, apprehensions, fear of the unknown and numerous anxieties were my appetizers. And I have indulged in them so much that I became afraid to venture out.

Materialism. I have carefully plotted my path towards limitless accumulation of material wealth. I believed there is happiness in it. I end up living beyond my means of subsistence, all because I mistook net worth as equivalent with self-worth.

Need for Approval. I have always valued other’s opinion to the point of compromising my own. Meeting my own anticipated expectations of others toward me has controlled my becoming. I have lost myself; my own conception of who I am has become distinctively blurred.

Denied by the First Premise, I thrived on the wrong purposes. With misaligned priorities and motivations, I have lost the vigor of living life and of being one with life. But the wonder of living is not so much on what I have gone through in the past and where I am right now. It lies on its inherent capacity to be changed and redirected—perhaps an automatic debugging device that checks for error, and corrects it later on; an auto-immune mechanism that repairs wounded tissues and estranged scars.