May Your Road Be Rougher This Year
Positive thinking is okay but often detrimental to achievements.
Life, if it is going to be abundant, must have plenty of hills and vales. It must have plenty of sunshine and rough weather. It must be rich in obfuscation and perspicacity. It must be packed with days of danger and of apprehension. — Tai Solarin
If by now you have flunked almost half of the targets which you set for this year, I suggest that you continue reading.
It just might be too late by end of the year when you realize that running only by that positive-thinking mantra is no use for real growth.
Get up and move it!
Perchance, you do not believe in setting such yearly goals as ‘resolutions’, but you all the same want something to fundamentally change in how you approach life.
If you can’t identify with any of the above still; but you lean more towards the deliberateness and spontaneity which the uncertainties of life deals us every day, you also may benefit from wishing yourself a rougher road for the remainder of the year.
Hear me out…
Ever since I read “May Your Road Be Rough”, I have been pondering what rough roads in life really meant and why humans who are cut out for greatness should wish it upon themselves.
The phrase “May your road be rough” was coined in a 1964 piece by a 20th century Nigerian thinker, pragmatist, educationist and atheist, Dr. Tai Solarin.
In simple terms, a rough road is the antithesis of what religious folk pray for daily before they set forth for the world at dawn. Anyway, who doesn’t wish to have a great day? Yet we are faced with the crests and troughs of life daily no matter how much we try to force a great day.
No doubt that Solarin’s outlook on life, and his atheism particularly, influenced that shocking coinage. He posits that the ones who sit comfortably in their self-sufficiency can never go too far in life. He concluded that those who crave and covet self-preservation hardly break new grounds and have their history eroded too soon.
What is a life passing quietly as it came without folklore-worthy event? What good has such uneventful life done itself or the world? Icons and heroes never sat in their comfort zones subsuming their drive in positive thinking all day.
Interestingly, there has been a craze of Positive Thinking evangelists in the 21st century who mill about with motivational rhetoric.
Books such as The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale have made the human race complicit in the belief that humans should have no part in unfortunate events.
Jesus of Nazareth once told his disciples who expected that things would be a smooth sail as they were following a god; “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, throughout the world, there is no paean without pain. Jawaharlal Nehru…wants to meet his troubles in a frontal attack. He wants to see himself tossed into the aperture between the two horns of the bull. Being there, he determines he is going to win and, therefore, such a fight requires all his faculties. — Tai Solarin
Without hesitation, Jesus revealed the reality of life to his apostles if they were ever to be as great as he was. Nobody who is ambitious has ever had a life without incident or unpleasantness. There is never a hero without an extraordinary story backing up it’s emergence.
That there are a few people who have been perhaps successful due to Positive Thinking does not erase the outlier privilege which luck has served them. That we can move mountains just by sheer force of our willpower is not going to do us any good eventually.
The porn of courting the easy life and having it smooth in life is making more and more millennials demand in entitlement outcomes/benefits which they are never willing to grind or labor for.
And this has somewhat become the dearth of the human specie — the gradual descent of man from the same levers which made them ascend to a peak in evolution.
“The medievals believed in the weakness of the will, but the power of the intellect. But today we believe in the power of the will and the weakness of the intellect.” — Peter Thiel
Humor me:
Tell me how many times, out of a possible 10 chances, that you could wish away dying in a plane crash.
How many times could you survive attempts at testing for evidence of life on Mars as an Astronaut? How many times do you get to come out of a fatal tornado, hurricane or earthquake alive?
How many chances of 10 do you have at avoiding being one of the victims of a viral epidemic or localized food poisoning?
If such odds are stacked against us, why not altogether transpose them into things which could benefit us personally or for others?
We also often forget and try to ignore the fact that natural order will always take its own bets against our supposed magical wishes of positive thinking, prayers and tricks of avoiding rough roads at all times.
The human desire for always blocking tragedies and challenges might even be a cause of unhappiness in adults. The apprehension and accompanying fear that our plans for a future event might fall apart too soon puts us on an uncomfortable edge — edging us to play it safe most of the time.
The advantage in wishing ourselves a rough road and understanding that we are not above befallment already prepares our minds to rise faster from falls and recover from grief whenever we encounter tragedy.
A rough road toughens us up and prepares us for tempests which may come. Rough roads puts us as humans on the path of self-discovery faster than any other exercise or engagement can.
“As I sit here now, when I take off my shoe and I look down at my scar, I see beauty in it. I see all the hard work, all the sacrifices. I see the journey that it took to get back to this point of being healthy. And I see beauty in that struggle.” — Kobe Bryant
These days, whether I engage in positive-think or prayers or meditation; by the time I set forth for the world, I am equally prepared for the rough roads too because the road to success, lasting happiness and fulfillment is jagged, convoluted and paved with occasional disappointment. And we are better off preparing for the eventualities and possibilities than avoiding them by all means.
