Life Owes Us Nothing

Life Owes Us Nothing

By Tony DeLorger © 2011

Have you ever thought that life owes you something, the answers to your dreams, the fulfilment you deserve and the happiness of which you are entitled? Of course you have, we value our needs and wants highly, regardless of anything or anyone else.

The truth of it is simple and obvious but most people miss it, wanting to complicate life and their living of it. Life owes us nothing and what we deserve or don’t deserve is not about justice but balance, purely dependent on our actions. What follows in our lives does so because of our actions, attitudes and perspective. The more we put into life, the more we get out of it. Expecting what you want to just manifest is grossly ignorant. What we want results from us making it happen through energy, attention and action.

There are no givens in life, just opportunities. Opportunity arises when we know what we want and we take action to make that happen. Luck is not granted us; it is deserved as a reward of action. As the saying goes ‘it only took ten years of constant and arduous work to become an overnight success.’ Life is free, but the benefits of it are at a cost, our cost.

There is no movement or learning from remaining at rest. Forgive the platitude but a journey always begins with a single step. And so must we, to make our dreams come true, make a step in that direction. Luck, opportunity and success are results of our enterprise, our efforts toward a goal. However small the step, it brings you closer and offers more steps toward success. The journey is always about learning and without that we would not be ready to experience our goal. What each journey offers is the experiences needed to accept what we want and desire.

Goals are often misguided and many times not what we really want. The journey toward the goal both verifies its validity and what we need to achieve to uphold that goal once reached. Reaching a goal is never an end, but the beginning of the responsibility associated with that goal. For example, if you wanted to be a pop star, you would not only need to be a proficient singer and performer, but you would need to learn about the industry. You would need to understand the impact of paparazzi, the lack of privacy, managing money, taxes, staff and so on. This information cannot be gained overnight and a balanced perspective and understanding would only come from experience and learning. Without this journey, no-one would cope and the dream would dissolve quickly. We have all seen this before.

So in determining our goals, we should be careful and understand what is necessary to attain them. This information then becomes the skeleton of your journey, the foundation from which you will ascend to the heights of your chosen field of endeavour. It may no be a career; it could be giving up cigarettes, losing a few pounds or taking a class for a hobby you’d like to undertake. Regardless of the goal, the process of attainment is the same. We need to understand the goal, what is necessary to reach it by abilities and training, and finally take those necessary steps, with focused energy and determination.

It’s no good awaiting success, it doesn’t follow you around, it comes because of your input, your wants and actions. The world owes us nothing at all, just the opportunity to do what we want. Whether that happens or not is solely up to us.