I stretched out to open my door to success, and some people said, “You are not ready yet…” “You are not famous yet…” “You are better at something else…” “Who will listen to you?”
All this crap had the same conclusion: I had to remain the same person I was.
I had to wait till what I wanted came to me, and I think I believed them…because for some years I felt it was immoral to go for what I wanted.
Our society teaches us to ever wait.
I look back in my life and realize many who told me to “slow down” were wrong. I was meant to be a soul engineer and equip humans to live lifetimes well spent.
It was not by choice. It was because inspiration persistently knocked at the door of my heart and there would be no peace trying to ignore that knock.
Inspiration is a very sensitive visitor, turn it down and it will turn around, walk away never to return.
When you keep finding reasons not to do something rather than reasons to do it, then you will never do anything, that’s the advice one amazing lady, Bisila Bokoko, once told me.
Life has no perfect conditions. Summer is always too hot, winter is too cold, autumn drops leaves off trees and spring is too beautiful to get busy.
Loser talk will encourage you to wait for a time when this world will turn perfect for your dreams. That day never comes.
In fact, we dream because the world is imperfect. No one dreams in a perfect world. What would be there to dream?
In Life Capsules for Success, I write that
“Your dreams didn’t need a perfect world to be dreamt, therefore there is no reason to believe that they need a perfect world to come true.”
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA | Life Capsules for Success
Your dreams were dreamt to perfect an imperfect world.
Things don’t get easy till you make them easy. If you find an easy life that you never made, it shows somebody took the pain that you didn’t take.
And very few people carry the cross for someone else. Even for Jesus, his cross-bearer was not found among his friends, neither was it from anyone in Jerusalem.
A passerby African by the name Simon of Cyrene – that was the stranger who helped Jesus carry the cross.
It will be difficult to find someone who will make your life easy. And you can live a very hard lifetime waiting for an easy life to come by.
Face your fearful nights and take the painful punches. Hardworking people work on what they want even when they are still afraid to try.
They understand that fear is just an emotion and emotions make a miserably unstable foundation for any life.
If you are waiting for your emotions to align with your dreams, then you have a whole lifetime of waiting ahead of you.
Lazy people wait for perfect conditions, they know that such an excuse will always be valid because perfect conditions will never come.
However, laziness is not really doing nothing. Laziness is being busy doing the unnecessary because it is easy to do.
Laziness is getting busy looking for reasons to do the unimportant. Lazy people are busy people, only they are busy doing the unimportant.
During the planting season, lazy people will be busy too.
When others are busy planting they are busy playing.
Isn’t it amazing how the hand that aches when holding a sewing needle suddenly heals when it holds a Remote Control Unit to change television channels?
That’s a sign that laziness is not to do nothing, laziness is to do the unrequited.
It’s amazing how people can find it easy to do anything except that which is required.
Laziness, simply put, is being an alien to the season.
Life unfolds in seasons. For instance, there is a season of singleness.
As I wrote in my book, The Stranger in the Mirror, a season of singleness is the time to realize one of the strangers in your life is the person you see in the mirror every day – it’s yourself.
That realization opens a season when you start seeking your independence, your values, and your voice in this world.
Another season can be falling in love – a time when you find yourself spurred by an urge to merge your soul with another soul.
This is when you realize you don’t want to be alone even though you don’t yet really know why you want to be with somebody.
Sometimes it’s only when the season has passed that you really understand why.
These are examples of life’s seasons, and those who take them for granted are playing when others are planting.
For instance, in their flower days, some women deceived themselves into thinking they will be young forever.
They sneered at the good young man who wanted to marry and danced off with the Never-Settle-Down boys who looked adventurous.
A decade down the line it dawns on her that Mr. Never-Settle-Down truly never settles.
She looks around for the settle-down partner only to find “the good ones are already taken.”
The scales fall off her eyes and what she sees embitters her soul – she sees that it’s been long since anyone proposed to settle down with her.
“Why didn’t I notice the number of marriage proposals dwindling over those years?”
She looks at herself in the mirror and observes how she now struggles with make-up.
Sometimes she overdoes it because if she applies the same quantity she used to apply years back, somehow it doesn’t make her look the way she used to look back then.
For some time she believed, “These cosmetics, they no longer make them like they used to.”
But today with the scales fallen, she realizes she is the one who is no longer what she used to be.
She is not a girl anymore. She has not just grown up. She has grown old.
She was beautiful then, and any man could have died to have her. But now her flower days are gone, so the bees are passing her by.
No honey has been made through her flowery days because she lived as an alien to the seasons.
A similar example for men is in my life-changing book How I Kissed Heartbreak Goodbye. If you want clarity, I encourage you to get that book. You will get this topic in greater depth.
NB: the above example is not meant to blame anyone. Some women were never married because they chose it to be that way.
Some couldn’t because they were victims of men who chose to love many women.
They gave their everything, not knowing that love doesn’t turn foxes into lambs.
Some men too have spent their lives in love with scorpions. At one time they had to face reality and call it quits. This is when they realized they had lost a season in their lives.
My free book How I Kissed Heartbreak Goodbye addresses the solutions to that season’s dangers in helpful depth and detail.
In this book, however, the most notable is that life has seasons of its own that it demands us to dance to.
The seasons of life are like those different song tracks you hear playing in a movie background.
We don’t see them, but they affect us. We can’t touch them but they touch us.
They pace up our heartbeat and they pull us to the edge of the couch. Sometimes they make us burst into tears.
As the saying goes,
“Life is like a ballroom, no matter how much the music changes, you just keep dancing.”
Cinderella kept dancing with the Prince. You too have to keep dancing with your dreams.
Through the sweet and the tear songs, you just keep dancing. Without a warning; song tracks do change, but you have to learn to adjust.
Remember the best dancer wins something better than a gold medal – the best dancer wins the Crown.
That night at the ballroom dance, Cinderella danced to some of these eight songs of life.
According to research, life has eight songs that we all dance to:
a) Songs of Hope
b) Songs of Determination
c) Songs of Purpose
d) Songs of Ability
e) Songs of Identity
f) Songs of Love
g) Songs of the People
h) Songs of Wisdom
Make the best of each track because no song plays forever.
When one track plays away, don’t cry because it’s over, just smile because it happened.
That’s life. Everything ends at the point the next thing begins.
Never lose a tomorrow by focusing on a past that should be fading away.
In this book, Cinderella Taught me Lessons, we will only learn five of these eight songs. The rest you will find them in my next books, they deserve volumes of their own.
I almost wrote them all, but the clock just struck twelve… destiny denied me to keep you waiting to read what you have already read so far.
Even Cinderella didn’t have a chance to dance to all the eight songs.
Some were played after midnight when she was long gone back home.
It is those three that were played later that I will share in the books coming after this one.
Of course, these songs don’t always play in the order in which they are listed herein.
The Songs of Life are a shuffled playlist. And some are faster rhythms than others.
Like I said, you have to dance along.
I guess that is what makes life an adventure, don’t you think?
Let’s explore them in the next post…
