About transformation
Before we proceed further, we should establish a mindset for reading this chapter. These are some meditations about transformation.
There is no such thing as running in place.
You painfully grow wings to fly or you fall. There is no third option. Thinking that an absence of change is stability, is a self-deceit. When your evolution flatlines you start to rot in stagnation. Personal transformation never occurs as a result of random chance. It is always a product of meticulous and orderly steps that compound over a significant period of time.
The way of hardships is the way of love.
People change themselves only for two reasons: inspiration or despair. I walked my way from the latter to the former. On this journey, I understood the mechanism of awakening self-love. It appeared to be very straightforward.
If your case is serious you might be even starting your transformation from the place of hating yourself. That’s ok. Your current state of mind will mean nothing when you will be looking back from the future where the substantial transformation has already occurred.
Transformations go in cycles. You start changing yourself. You struggle. You relapse. You hate yourself for your weakness. You feel that the whole world is crumbling. It is not the world. It is you.
You persevere. You start crawling. You make first timid steps and you fail miserably. You hate yourself more. You get angry. You start over.
You work hard until suddenly you begin to see small results. You nurture them like tiny sprouts of hope breaking through the asphalt of your old lifestyle. It is a first flickering beam of light in the darkness of your ignorance.
Per aspera ad astra.
Through hardships to the stars.
Whispering these words, you bleed breaking your path through the thicket of self-improvement. And then you notice something — respect toward yourself for what you have accomplished.
As you go further you start to notice something. Seeing the collected achievements and the heads of slain demons of the past proudly exhibited in your inner hall of fame make you feel good about yourself. At this point, you know that something that is ahead of you might not have a definite shape and form but totally worth the struggle. You start liking yourself for the ability to deliver on your promises to yourself. You start liking yourself for your persistence.
You keep dropping the gold of good qualities on the iron of your shortcomings until one day you can’t see the iron anymore. It is still somewhere there deep in the barrel but you have greatly altered the composition of the content. People who used to know you can no longer recognize you. You look in the mirror and you do not recognize yourself either. You close your eyes and you can feel it inside — the Shine. The Shine of self-love blooming in your heart.
No pain — no gain.
This saying is old as hills but it will never lose its actuality. The degree of transformation that your body undergoes is directly-proportional to the amount of physical pain you agree to absorb. Your mental resilience is directly proportional to the amount of discomfort you are willing to cope with. Your success in taming your ego depends on the amount of suffering it brought you prior to the moment of your decision that you had enough.
You suffer from your ego. The ego is the one that is causing suffering and the one that undergoes it. But there is hope to end suffering for everyone.
There is one beautiful thing about ego.
It is its self-dissolving property.
Once you get exhausted by your suffering you start to ask the right questions. The right questions bring you to the right answers. The right answers elucidate the true nature of the ego. The ego starts to crumble when it gets recognized.
However, the ego will self-dissolve only in those who are ready to surrender to the truth. Those who choose to keep living in the world of illusions they built themselves, blaming others and not looking for the answers within, the Universe will continue to “slap” until the lessons are learned. Some people are just ineducable.
Transformation is life. It is the higher order of things. Evolution of nature, industrial revolutions, innovative disruption, global enlightenment — are all transformations. Things flow, things change. In the past years a man was considered smart when he knew a lot of things, today the man is smart if he is constantly re-educating himself. Those who fail to see it and resist to change will become antique.
“If you want something you’ve never had. You must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
Let me slightly rephrase it.
If you want something you’ve never had, you must become someone you have never been.
Thank you for reading my book “Meditations of the Millennial”.
If you want to support me on my mission, please, share this book with someone you love. Maybe they will find what they seek on its pages.
