Saturday, April 19, 2008

Determination is my Motto!

“When your determination changes, everything will begin to move in the direction you desire. The moment you resolve to be victorious, every nerve and fiber in your being will immediately orient itself toward your success. On the other hand, if you think, “This is never going to work out,” then at that instant every cell in your being will be deflated and give up the fight. Then everything really will move in the direction of failure.”
Daisaku Ikeda, Faith into Action, page 108
After reading this i felt truely inspired, i remember one of the repetitive songs they made us sing in primary school while we marched to the class room.
"Detaminasion is my mottor, determinasion!"
Of course we sang and marched our skinny legs on the dusty ground to classes, relived the boring "assembly" was over, but dreading the begining of math lessons, especially the recitation of the multipliction table.
But the saddest thing of all, for me at least, is i grew up a chronic pessimist, always giving up before i even tried. None of the repetitive chanting prepared me for the blows life could deal, niether did the dreaded math lessons improve my qauntitative abilities, instead as i grew older i withdrew to the comfortable shell of the literary world, my love for words growing in magnitude as i grew older. And the poignant realization that academic education does very little to prepare one for real life!

2 comments:

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe said...

Hi PM Jay,

Well said. To my father's dismay I was, and still am, quantitatively challenged. And yes, formal education doesn't solve all of life's problems, but some part of my brain appears not to have got that. Thanks for the nice comment on my story. It is part of a larger piece and I guess now I will truly not give up on it now. I notice you added my blog to your blogroll, but there is a mistake: the site is www.cheluchi.com

Woman in Transition said...

"And the poignant realization that academic education does very little to prepare one for real life!"

Indeed this is true. There is, what we call book sense vs. common sense. Common sense is what you get as you live. It truly cannot be found reading words on a page.

Life is beautiful. There are so many beautiful things in the world (such as your pictures are to me). Seek out the beautiful things in life. It is there. It's always there.

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