Are You Desiring Or Surviving?

Past midnight, one o clock in the morning, saturday night, someone was frantically ringing our apartment's doorbell. It was my neighbour.  The urgent message, "There is a fire spreading on the 19th floor. Lets go down. We need to get out of the building."

Within 10-15 minutes, as the firemen were climbing up and taking control of the situation, 160 families without any organized message, planning or direction had evacuated the building. At 1:15 AM all of us were right outside the building. The situation was under control shortly after that. No damage done. Everyone was chatting away with each other. 90% of us had never seen each other before. There prevailed a friendly calm of a 'night with no casualties'. There existed a quiet pride of surviving and more importantly enabling survival. 

This little story has no relevance to the title of this mail, however, as I was writing this morning and thinking about the Saturday night, a thought kept crossing my mind. The thought or rather a strange fact is that, that night everyone's desire was survival. It was achieved. Young, old, able, disable - every single person managed to climb down the stairs (lifts weren't working), some even 20 floors. In 15 minutes everyone was awake and out. Everyone was happy about it.

I say that this is a 'strange' fact because it bothers me that we are all so good at survival. I am not talking about that night. I am very glad that it ended the way it did. 

Like you and me once did, thousand of young people will finish schooling this year. Everyone of them will be seeking employment and careers. Young minds and hearts full of dreams, some have already decided on the companies they will chose and not the other way round. Some have already decided the great engineers and managers they will be. They saw their grades and they announced to their families, what they will become, and in no time. They will be the future, they know, they will be the change. The desires are burning. The passion is firing.  The ambitions are soaring. 

Yet, most of these young boys and girls, will grab the first offer they get. Some of them will face rejection. Most of them will not get the starting point they wished they got. Most of them dreaming to be the CEO's by the age of thirty will be reporting to these very  thirty year olds mindlessly wandering around our companies with still plenty of stages to go through.

The burning desire in no time will be reduced to 'hard reality' - it doesn't happen this way. The reality will soon become about doing a good job and rising to the next level. The soaring ambition will rest somewhere at the back of the mind. The competition is clear. There are too many people gunning for the next job. "I have to do well to even survive, leave alone becoming the CEO". The young men and women, in the name of learning, will quietly start getting accustomed to cultures and slowly start performing. They will settle in and revisit their goals and ambitions, after a reality check. WE WILL call it maturing because it was our story, it's theirs now. 

Somewhere down the line the ONLY DESIRE THAT WILL REMAIN IS SURVIVAL. Survival, of course, not in the traditional way of food and shelter. Survival, today, has a different form, survival or sustenance of a certain lifestyle, of a certain title, of a certain salary which is relative to our peers or friends, of a certain power, of a certain car, of a certain whatever!

Surrounded by our current realities, situations and opportunities, new goals are set, new yardsticks are automatically formed - that WE MUST to some extent achieve - TO STAY IN THE RACE.

The burning desires that once existed are now merely a hope or a wish, if not a fantasy. However, they have been well replaced with new goals and ambitions arising out of 'automatic-new-forced-commitments'

The new goals will eventually end up defining careers. More importantly, the new goals (in my words 'desire of survival') will define the purpose of many lives.

Every now and then we will hear of people who stayed honest to their desires and achieved it. People who fought odds and did not succumb to choices. Every human being will sometime in life, reach the age of understanding that the purpose of life is in desires we chose to act upon, in the impulses we chose (or not) to pursue, and wish that they hadn't given up on thoughts. Wishing will not bring realization of dreams. But desiring with a state of mind that becomes an obsession, then planning ways and means to acquiring it, and backing with persistence that does not recognize failure will bring desires to life. This last sentence by the way, is written by Thomas Edison and not by me. 

People will realize that the MAJOR DEFINITIVE PURPOSE lies in the 'desire' that all of us once had. We still know that it's somewhere within us. Most of us, if not all of us, will never acknowledge it. We do not want to face it anymore because we do not have the COURAGE to live it. We have all the REASONS to bury it.

Napoleon Hill, best selling 'achievement' author of all times once wrote: If the thing you wish to do is right, and you believe in it, go ahead and do it. Put your dream across, and never mind what 'they' say if you meet with temporary defeat, for 'they' perhaps, do not know that EVERY FAILURE BRINGS WITH IT THE SEED OF AN EQUIVALENT SUCCESS.

Henry Ford, poor and uneducated, dreamed of a horseless carriage, went to work without waiting for an opportunity. He has obviously put more wheels to work than any man who ever lived. He did it because he wasn't afraid to back his dreams. He did it because he didn't give up.

Thomas Edison dreamed of a lamp that could be operated by electricity. Despite 10,000 failures, he stood by that dream till it was reality. 

People who achieve their DESIRES, however big or small, DO NOT QUIT!

A burning desire to be or to do is a point from where the dreams take off. Dreams are not born of indifference, laziness or lack of ambition. You, once, not very long ago, had the desire ( may be you still have it). If you haven't achieved it it's because you gave up on it. Be aware it is still possible. 

 I quote below lines from a great poet