Trust Your Inspiration

Trust your inspiration. In a world where we do not have all the answers, where we have limited knowledge of how our dreams, efforts, futures, relationships and lives will play out, trust the things that move you. The things that elevate your mind, emotions, and spirit.

Inspiration — like passion, curiosity, love, purpose — all have a reason for existing. A reason unto themselves, that we do not understand completely. These emotions, and the reasons for them, are probably of the class of truths that will never be fully explained.

Who among us knows why we are inspired to a dream, only for it to unfold on its own terms after more than a decade of relentless work? In such a way that is intrinsically surprising and unfathomable, even to the person most intimate with that dream: he who dreamt it and pursued it.

There are forces at work in the universe that no human being truly understands. And some of the most interesting are those that move through us as emotions, passing through our consciousness and driving us to action, from a level so deep, it is beyond instinct. Perhaps even deeper than intuition, which in my belief, is itself but the tip of a great iceberg of untapped potential within Man.

Believe In The Dream

“If this enterprise is not to be accomplished, why did you move me, Shamash, with the restless desire to perform it? How can I succeed if you will not succour me?” — An Ancient Sumerian King to the God Shamash

I wrote down that quotation years ago because it perfectly described a feeling that I had been wrestling with at that time. (Forgive me, I do not know what Sumerian tablet it is from off the top of my head.) What amazed me is that a king of ancient Sumer around 4000 years ago captured exactly what I had been feeling myself in this modern age. All these centuries and millennia later, in a world that he would not recognize.

We are not so different after all.

The question I was pondering was really a fear: what if god inspired me with a dream that I was doomed to fail? Why? To that I do not have an answer. Not least because the history of our species is littered with failed attempts — at everything. Countries lose in war. Einstein never completed his Unified Field Theory. I fail at something every day, and have done so more times than I can count.

Failure is a distinct possibility in every endeavour. I could attempt to assuage that fear by saying that it is the journey that teaches us, and that the lesson for us to learn was through the effort, not the realization.

While I agree with that sentiment, I don’t like it. I believe that there is always a chance for success, if we can find it. No the answer is not always to work harder or longer. In my experience we also need to seek ways to work smarter, work differently, and find guides and teachers who have done it already. To help us install a new program in our minds, habits, skills, knowledge, and approach that is not limited. Even above these approaches is seeking answers in the depths of our consciousness and spirit, through unique training.

All of these are tools that need to be in our toolbox. But this does not answer the question.

If we are doomed to fail, fine. You have to accept that possibility, because nothing is certain. We have to be willing to try anyways. What matters in the end is whether the path is worth it. I believe that to Trust Your Inspiration is right, because I would rather do the things that inspire me, because I would rather be inspired. As a rule I would rather be enlivened by those emotions as the path itself, than some senseless drive for success based on the illusion of superiority.

I would rather fail at real passions, because the path itself is worth it. I have spent so much of my life learning things that don’t truly engage me, and learning to love them, because I needed them to better understand and do what I really loved. But in the end, while I have learned to love many things that are foreign to me, the inspiration will always be deeper than the things I learned to love.

It inspires us for a reason. For me, those things feel like truth. Not objective truth in the sense that they are true. But truth in the sense of destiny and purpose. As if those things were an extension of my being, and are my reason for existing. Perhaps the emotion of inspiration itself is but a resonance between our true selves, the universe, and what we can be in a life.

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.” — Jim Carrey

Remember That It Is Your Actions The Ultimately Move You

Inspiration moves us, drives us, and guides us, but never forget that it is your actions which ultimately get you there. It is my belief that one of the greatest causes of failure, is simply actions that don’t live up to the ideal. Little mistakes repeated over years. Not enough discipline. Pride and stubbornness that prevented someone from learning from their peers, or changing their approach to something because they were convinced that their way was right.

Don’t let that be you.

Take time to find the right resources, the right opponents, the right teachers, and the right credentials — and more importantly — be humble enough to do so. You don’t have all the answers. So go find people and institutions that have some of those you need. Don’t miss days, don’t look for shortcuts, and above all, don’t let your fire go out. Stoke it, focus it, and burn it brighter.

Unfulfilled potential is one of the great travesties of human existence. The kids who have died in every great war, the people that die of starvation every day, or are strangled to death by the penitentiary of poverty. I often imagine how many of these people could have truly been something, if raised in the right circumstances. What they could have given to the world.

It is even more disheartening, because I believe this to be true of every single human. Each one of us has a destiny, but the majority of us do not appear to realize it fully. So trust your inspiration. Trust the emotion itself, the passion and the ideal. Do everything in your power to live up to it every day, to allow it to grow, and one day, to manifest it in the world.