“You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

You’ve came to this place because you’ve been here before, randomly stumbled upon it, or found out about it from someone. In either case, you will move along or stay to read that what is written here.

In your everyday life you go about working for someone else to earn a living, or own a business. It is a life demanding that you plan family, personal or company’ budget, vacation times and financial forecasts. But it wasn’t always like it. At one time in your life you had a choice, you’ve made it and now you are the outcome of the decision. You have had many choices like this, you have had them today, but decision was not yours.

Have you ever stopped for a brief moment and asked yourself “Why am I doing it? What is holding me here?” It won’t do any good to ask it now because you haven’t come to this question on your own. Just go on and live your life like you’ve been doing it for many years.

If you done it previously, it would mean that you have that uneasy feeling of unsatisfaction, lingering in the background and reminding of it every so often. And I would bet anything that you are doing your best to anaesthetize it to the best of your ability, burrowing it underneath mental constructs that are not of your own, squeezing it into tiny cubicle inside your consciousness. But the more you try to forget about it, the more you compress it, the stronger it persists in your mind – just like when squeezing a spring you need a lot of effort to keep it tight.

It happens when somebody asks you to try something different, something outside of your area of expertise or interests. You do not realize why you refuse the offer; again, you get an uneasy feeling and react on it. When someone comes and asks “Can you help me with something?” – is your response “yes, I can”?

Why do you help someone with something and rob them of chance to learn? Is it just plain ignorance that stops you to think for a moment and say “no” – something that is the best choice you can make for him or her? Do you truly think that after your help they will understand how to handle things they never done before?

There is a Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” You are feeding someone each and every day, and the more you do it, the more they become dependent on you. And they not just become dependent on who provides the food, but also to what sort of food it is. You form their taste without giving them a chance to try something else, and after some time they will not want anything else.

You domesticated them, just like you have been domesticated yourself.

It has been said in the Bible – save yourself, and thousands around you will be saved. So why, why is it that you find excuses not to work on yourself and instead decide to help others? It is a powerful excuse that has been conditioned into us – help the weak because they cannot help themselves. It is very easy to give up responsibility and convince yourself to follow the crowd. Be a food lover, have a good time with friends, chat about latest news or weather, practice your intellect with crosswords and feed it more gum to exercise mental jaws.

Be lost in the thick of thin things.

And then, after decades have passed, be unsatisfied with results of working so hard every day and only having to live that much longer. And, with so much spare time on your hands, truly understand – all that time was wasted on things that did not matter.

“Once in a while you have to take a break and visit yourself.”

Audrey Giorgi

To change this, you, as a person, have to grow.

And I am not talking about growing extra branches that will produce more fruits in years to come. No, you will have to dig out whole tree, with every root that is holding it, grown by others who dared to strangle you with an advice. You will have to chop it apart and inspect each branch and every root.

And be astonished, for everything you see, imprinted on the bark, embedded into the heartwood and manifesting from the taproot was a deception.

A lie that you managed to live with. A lie that was poisoning and eroding you from inside.  A lie that the world around you is not what you thought it to be, a world that doesn’t work by the laws you thought it would.

To start growing anew, you will have to plant a seed of “why” in your life. With the “why” in mind, you will have a duty of care and protection of “why”, every moment of your life hereon.  You will have others trying to sprinkle grass around it, be it family, friends or coworkers. Do what you believe is necessary, and do not hold them accountable if grass seeds become weed that suck away the nutrients. After all, who knows best for the seed if not you, who knows it inside out and holds it inside, feeling it grow like no other every single day?