19. Rule 6: No matter what you do in life, it will always take longer than you think, so be prepared.

 

04/07/2014

 

I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. There’s this bit in there about how things happen to help us along our path and other stuff happens that appear to hinder us and we call it fate and use it as an excuse to give up.

Well, there is so much fate in my life that I’ve even started testing it. Whenever I try and do something productive to get somewhere ‘on my path’ something happens and I end up getting nothing done. Yet when I give in and just sit on the sofa in front of the TV doing nothing, nothing interrupts me; the day goes by without incident. It’s starting to make me think; maybe my path is to do nothing. I sit and watch TV all day, just like everyone thinks I do, and nothing happens. I do little jobs and errands for other people and nothing happens. I try to do something for myself, for example, I’ve been trying to sit down and type this for a few days now, I’ve only just gotten to it, and that was after ten minutes of fighting with my laptop to get it to actually switch on. But apparently there’s nothing wrong with it, it was just ‘fate’ again.

Maybe it it’s the opinion of others that’s holding me back, their collective thoughts. They all believe that all I do is sit on my arse and do nothing so due to their expectation that’s all I’m able to do.

Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m tired, exhausted even, maybe I just don’t seem to be getting anywhere, maybe how I’m feeling internally is affecting my external life. Maybe I’m the source of all my problems and I need to find my passion again, my love for what I do, my hope.

Oh, I went to Waterstones the other day. Rhonda Byrne’s got a new book out. The Hero or something like that. I’ll admit, I was tempted. But I took the step of throwing out all her books, so why would I add one now.

She is not getting any more money out of me.