Every Setback is A Learning Opportunity.
On Saturday I woke up early enough so that I would make it to Kikuyu central Seventh Day Adventist church in time. Everything went on well right from when I left my house until I arrived at Kikuyu town. Truth be told, I didn’t know exactly where the church was and so I decided to cast lots with the conductor and the directions I had been given. I told him, the conductor, of my destination and he told me he knew the place very well and so I placed all my hopes on him. The next stop was at Thogoto seventh Day Adventist church. I felt disappointed but was left with no option but to board a vehicle back to Kikuyu town. I hovered endlessly like a headless chicken until finally I found out my destination. Funny enough, it was a stone throw away from the town.
I arrived in church and realized my friends from Thika had gone through the same escapade. I took a moment to look at the events of that day and realized I could learn from such a disappointment. I deeply scrutinized every outcome of that day and realized I drew some positive energy from each happening. The first lesson was knowing knew places that I had not initially taken interest to know. The universe was teaching me that if I didn’t take time to learn about my country voluntarily, then it will force me to learn about them like it did to me that day.
From that very setback, I also learnt the principle of patience. I hovered in several places more than once in trying to locate my destination, I realized that just like life, to succeed is not for the faint at heart. Patience is only understood well by the real participants of the game. When the player in the field gets injured, we only feel it emotionally for a moment. The player is the one who takes home the greatest chunk of the pain and gets to know what patience means for him to get back to the field. Every point when we get a setback, it is a moment to sit back and try to see what it is teaching you.
Let me take a moment and talk about what we ought to do when we find ourselves in unexpected and awful situations. I learnt this things in the book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff whereby the author was saying that instead of looking badly at the rude shop attendant, take a moment and ask yourself what he/she is trying to teach you. They could be teaching you on the value of patience, empathy, love or perhaps refining your social interactions in terms of mannerisms. Maybe the worker has been working the whole day with several challenges at home and a miserable paycheck and all they need is for you to appreciate them to brighten their day. When they serve you badly instead appreciate them and show them love and I am sure that will be a lifetime gift to them. We should at least harness positivity from every challenge we get.
How often have we hold on to a past that we cannot change? As a matter of fact, the last thing we don’t have control over and can never change is history or rather our past. Thinking so much about it only brings misery and pain. We can never run away from the past. We can run and run and run only to realize it is not far enough. It is the good things we will want to think about always but it is the bad ones we will remember first and they will always haunt us. We can change this haunting when we start to keenly shift out some lessons the fails have for us. The millennial generation always exists in a world of instant gratification and that is never the case. When you want the best wife, you have to be patient and you can get to learn of this when you miss your bus or flight and positively pick out the positive lesson contained therein.
Now here is the secret to learning from every setback, practice, practice and practice. An elder stood to speak to a young people and said that the young people’s greatest problem is to walk in a 100 meters race and expect to get the prize. They forget that it takes fifteen years of faithful daily practice to win the prize or break a world record. Everything begins with practice and practice alone. The next thing is that we need to highly develop our mental abilities. We can do this by reading books. I mean good books. Read many of them as much as you can and when the mental faculties are well developed then other aspects of life get developed too.
Remember the golden rules of lives. Always love people and do well to them. Always harness positive lessons from all disappointments and setbacks. Try, fail, fail and fail but don’t give up; soon you will catch a break. Then practice always while being keen to keep patience in check. Lastly, always read and read many books plus other resourceful materials because the moment you stop reading is the day you stop living.
Every moment gives us an opportunity to learn something new that gets to build us and make our lives a little better. We choose on what to look at and for in every challenging moment we encounter in our daily lives. It is our lives to live and our consequences to bear.
Copyright @ 2017
