The heart and art of molding your life
Success and life are both a process of elimination and concentration. We eliminate things from our lives so that we can concentrate on realizing the mental image or the dream we have into a living reality. Life and success are an art form, and you are the artist.
Today I liken life to the art of pottery. Art always flows from the heart, and an artist is always deeply connected to their art. Art understands the language of the artist and vice versa. The rhythm and the chemistry between them is always perfect.
A potter is always aware of the potential in the clay. He treats it with elegance, great flexibility, and spontaneity. They know exactly what they want to see pop out of the clay when the work is done, but they still allow interruption from the clay as it responds to the molding.
The potter’s skill is not in guiding the wheel but the clay, because the spinning of the wheel does not shape clay into a beautiful article, but the mind, heart, and hands of the potter. Clay is a potential material that you can use to make any type of article you want. You decide what your clay should become, you give it a shape, and you decide its destiny.
If by any chance a vessel breaks, a potter can recreate another from the same clay. He doesn’t pick up the pieces of the vessel in anger and despair and throw them out, because even in brokenness, the clay is still useful.
Because when the article breaks, it does not mean, the potter has lost his skill or the clay has lost its potential.
Be careful how you treat yourself after a failure.
You can make something out of it. The potter does not lose his heart, art, or hands when the vessel breaks; he creates something beautiful with those broken pieces.
Shouldn’t we learn something from a potter about our own lives? I would like to propose this to you. Treat your life like a potter and his clay. Mold, shape, direct, and condition your personality and your life to become an article of value. Just like a potter, what he does with the clay makes something beautiful and valuable out of the clay.
I do not like to view life as a battle because in every battle there must be a winner and a loser, so who do you battle with in life? How do you define wins and losses in life?
To me, life is an art. Art is beautiful, art is natural, art is personal, and art is more imaginative than intellectual. It creates things from imagination, not reason.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.-ALBERT EINSTEIN
It flows from within. You can get ideas from anywhere, but you must create something unique. It doesn’t focus on competing or impressing, but expressing what is inside you. In true art, the joy is in realizing your imagination, not selling it.
Artists take raw materials, sometimes low-quality or cheap materials, and create something of value.
Life is an art form, and you are the artist. It is clay with a potential potter it to something unbelievable. Some of you may say, “My life is a broken vessel.” I was almost there, but it broke to pieces. So I lost hope and I gave up. There was no future for me. My friend, you just bought a cheap lie. I know you had put your heart into it, and when things went south, everything went south with it, including your heart.
But hello, friend! Listen to me. Pick up the damn pieces, and get back to work, and can mold something of value out of what seems to be a broken life. You’re not yet done, buddy. There’s still potential in you. Learn from a potter. You do not control the spin of the wheel, but you can guide the clay into the rhythm of your hand and it will begin to take a shape. Shape yourself and your life. It doesn’t really matter how many times or how hard you have failed; your life is still worth something.
Even if you do not shape your life intentionally, something or someone is doing that because the wheel of life keeps rotating.
The process began at your conception, after birth people around you, schools and life experiences shaped in someone. Who you are did not come from nothing. You where molded to fit in a certain culture, community, career or professional.
Nevertheless you are not a finished article, now it’s your responsibility to mold your life, if you don’t the past will become your destiny.
The wheel will continue to spin and your life will spin with it, because the world waits for nobody. But you will achieve nothing until you put your hand into it and guide your life.
All articles are not the same; in fact, each piece is always unique. To be perfect, valuable, and fulfilling, you and your life do not have to look like any other life. Be comfortable with being different.
If in the whole world, nobody shares your finger prints, why do you want to share your lifestyle?
However, molding yourself and your life is a process. You need patience, you need a positive attitude, and you need the flexibility of a potter. He doesn’t give up on his vessel. You cannot control the wheel (the world), but you can control the clay.
“Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.” Charles R. Swindoll
Read that quote again.
Have you read it again?
Now make a decision whether you are going to allow the 10% to shape, run and determine your happiness, success and the destiny of your life or 90%.
Whatever you decide, just remember that the wheel spins, it doesn’t stop.
