Feeling inspired in life is an important part of sustaining motivation. But while inspiration might be elusive at times, there are still plenty of strategies we can use to encourage it to strike more often. Every one of us has to be gifted with this great bounty. But the question is where it originates. I think that for the proper reception of real inspiration, you need to open your minds and hearts. Because only a live heart and mind can feel the real current of inspiration. The real inspiration, in fact, is initiated by your own mind and heart. It is your own self which must kindle the spark of inspiration within you. When you do that the whole nature and super nature inside and outside you then comes ahead to empower this spark. Then the time comes when your inspiration makes to achieve great feats in this world. The spark of inspiration is always kindled with positivity and confidence. It survives to become a large flame only by diligence. Diligence is such a great thing to focus on. Diligence; in simple words, means smart work and not only hard work. When you are careful while working hard and when you know how and when to work and how to use your leisure properly, you are called diligent. Diligence is a mixture of determination, dedication, and consistency.
Your inspiration is created inside you when you are aware of your powers. It is important that you do not consider yourselves not capable of achieving anything you desire to achieve. You can achieve anything in this world provided you work as hard as desire you desire and deserves. Great ambitions need great hard work. But nothing is impossible for you. Your first duty must be to discover your aim. Great men believe that your aim is often the thing that kicks your heart the most. The word kick here is used in its figurative meaning. It means that thing which makes you feel full of joy while doing it. Your belief itself is the best guarantee of your success.
However, the easiest way to succeed is your hard work. There is no alternative to this blessing. Yes, you read it correctly. Hard work is not less than a blessing. It is what makes us alive. We feel the current of life in us till we work hard. Once we leave the habit of hardworking we become weak and make. Hard work in fact, is the difference between the living and the dead. Inspiration does not mean that anybody will delude you by saying that you have good fortune and thus you will achieve the things you want without any struggle. That is deception. Inspiration is true guidance. It is not deception. Truth is that to achieve great things in this world you have to make great sacrifices. If you open your eyes and mind a bit and see and try to understand, you shall find that all the great individuals who achieved great things in this world have achieved them only due to their hardworking and sacrifices.
Galib the great Indian poet of the nineteenth century has written a great verse to teach us the point. I will try to write the simplest possible translation and meaning of that verse as under;
“If from the envy your heart is cold, then watch the spectacle, May be what you see might open your mind too.”
Hali; the Shams ul Ulema and one of the Galib’s greatest students explained the meaning of this verse in his book Yaad Gaar e Galib like this, “If your heart is frozen due to jealousy of others, open your eyes and see around you. Perhaps this search may open your heart too and you shall know why those around you have achieved what you could not achieve. They have achieved success because they worked hard.”
You might be a failure because you are confined to your comfort zone only.” Until you won’t come out of your comfort zone and struggle, there is hardly any chance of your success. As Jocko Willink has said, ” There is no growth in the comfort zones.” You have to come out of them and suffer under the warm sun. Only then can you feel the bliss of the real shade and real achievement.
Hard work itself is a greater blessing than success that is what some great minds feel. We must love hard work and try to be excellent in our struggles always. Success will certainly knock on our doors.
There is a great saying ” Try and try again until you succeed.” Samuel Beckett; the great absurdist playwright of English literature once said, ” Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter try again. Fail again. Fail better. ” It clearly means that for some great people, it is not the success that matters much. They just love to try. They try and try again. They don’t leave their habit of trying. We almost all believe that life is a test. Every test needs a trial. After a trial, we either fail or pass. But we all try. Yes, we all must try for success that is the highest aim of our life. But our trial is more important than the success itself. That is why we may take care of the means as M.K Gandhi said, the ends will take care of themselves. This approach will teach us that we must remain honest in our struggles always. If we only think about our success then it may corrupt our means. We may employ evil methods to succeed. But the success achieved by dishonest methods is no success at all. Failure is not a shame, we must bear in our mind, dishonesty is. The failure must not threaten you. It is actually your struggle that matters and not the result of it.
Another important thing for inspiration is convincing the students, particularly, to ask whatever meaningful questions they can. Nowadays we see that the asking tendency of the students has been declining. The students do not ask questions in classes. You must have questions in your mind. It is in our nature to have questions. You might need to discover the questions if you do not know what they. They are there may be hiding in your subconscious. You need to bring them forth. Often you know what you want to ask but you don’t. You feel you might sound a fool if you ask. The great Chinese thinker and philosopher has said, ” The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” The first thing is that it hardly makes you a fool if you ask a question.
Sometimes, rather it makes you to seem better, more intelligent, and brilliant. Still, even if it makes you a fool when you know the answer to the question you cease to be a fool, particularly about that particular phenomenon. The dearth of curiosity in our students is a dangerous thing. I don’t believe there may be something like that. Curiosity is our birth trait. We all human beings are born with it. But sometimes due to many reasons like the apathy of those who don’t know the answers rebuke the students for asking ridiculous questions. Sometimes the student’s shyness and other things oppress this tendency in them. Our social environment and socialization to affect this tendency. We are not often encouraged for asking different questions. We are even suppressed for doing so sometimes. I ask my simple questions to my students often and ask them to reflect on why have not they asked the same questions. For example the other day I asked my students of classes 9th and 10th, why the sun always rises in the east. Many of them could not answer. This is because they have never reflected on it. Some students try to give religious types of answers to such scientific type of questions that do not fit in such cases. Students are sometimes even alarmed to not ask certain questions. They are told that their answers are already in such and such religious books and thus they ought not to ask such questions. Sometimes they are provided with such ridiculous information that makes them doubt the proofs provided by science. Our inspiration begins with the arrival of the questions in our minds. It develops when we try to seek the answers. It reaches its zenith when the correct answers are found.
Author is a Govt teacher. He can be mailed at bukhari.hilalahmad5@gmail.com
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