YOUR ENDING SENTENCE
“Being yourself in a world that is chasing yo-yo-ed version of everyone else is the ultimate reward.” ~ Warikoo Ankur, Arthur Do Epic Shit
Every person on the face of the earth is writing a story, a story she/he has control, to a greater extent, to maintain and alter how it flows . We are lucky to live in the current age, in which distance and time have been shrunk. We are the most connected generation in history.
No generation before us enjoyed all the goodness we bask in nowadays. The internet has made possible many things we couldn’t fathom, one can have live second-to-second update of a celebrity’s lifestyle many seas away. This connectivity has so many advantages, however, with it comes many devils.
It is easier than it ever been, to write a perfect story one can reminisce about. Equally, it is easier to write an imperfect story given the modern amplified rat-races many are competing in.
They are caught up in the comparison mode that slaves the minds and lives of many young men and women who believe success is a zero-sum game, relative to the neighbor’s or former classmate’s.
Daniel Pink, author of Drive, writes about perfectly brings it out:
“In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. A great man, she told him, is one sentence. Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: He preserved the union and freed the slaves. Franklin Roosevelt’s was: He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war. Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.”
One’s story needs not to be a copy-cat of someone else’s. To many, success is to jump over the societal bar. Not many moons ago, a groom arrived in a chopper during a kukyala ceremony. My comment to the news was, “The kukyala bar has been raised. The wise pass below it.” There is no point to prove jumping over such a relatively higher bar.
To write a story you shall love to read out loud or your great-great-grand children shall proudly tell, is to understand who you are and look deep inside to find what your purpose is. No comparisons, no fancy fads racing across your mind. One’s purpose is his/her ending sentence. Your ending sentence could be: He loved his children and raised intelligent, healthy and principled children. Or She was a lady of noble character many young ladies grew up emulating and her legacy lives on. It can be simple as: He loved and provided for his family against a background of hardship.
To orient a life towards meaning is to have purpose that goes beyond self, enriches the lives of other people. To stripe off all ego, seek to love and serve with no reservation in any way possible.
It is beneficial to have ending sentences for every aspect of your life, be it spirituality, finance, relationships, career, et cetera. One of the best fictional novelist, Irving John starts with an ending sentence for all his bestselling books and writes towards the ending sentence, instead of starting with a sentence that meanders towards nowhere and losses it track to a perfect end.
What is your ending sentence? I need not to know it now, have it and live towards it. Akuume.
