Live UP Don't Give up

Einstein once said that we truly fail when we give up; as long as we do not give up we continue to progress and learn and even if we do not achieve the desired outcome at the end of the day, we do not fail.

We can pause, we can ponder, we can change our tactics and strategies, we can rest and recuperate, but we can never give up. Giving up is a finality like quitting, to not continue to pursue what you truly wish to achieve leads to real failure. As long as you do not give up you are on the journey of discovery.

Life is such that almost nothing would ever happen exactly the way you plan or wish it to happen. You never made a plan to read these words, but you are here right now reading this post. And you have no idea how far or close you might be to your goal. You don’t know when things will start turning your way and which doors will open when you knock hard enough. You do not know what the horizon will bring you unless you have climbed high enough to peek beyond. The goal of having a goal is only so you begin the journey. The journey is important and the only way you can keep it going is by never giving up.

The initial goal with which you might have started your voyage would eventually shift, transform and modify, so even if you don’t achieve that goal it is not a failure since it isn’t a goal anymore in the present. But what is important is the journey that you began and upon which you are embarked right now. There’s no way you can give up on the journey just because you didn’t find the milestone on the way that you wanted to cross. Because I am sure you have crossed that milestone already or soon you would but your eyes didn’t sense it or you crossed it far high above. If you walk along a meridian in a perfect straight line; you would keep crossing latitudes every moment, which means that you are crossing every point on earth that lies on that latitude. You won’t see most of these points, yet you have crossed them.

There is no fixed goal there is no constant ideas or unchanging dreams. The failure in life is to believe that there are. All we have and would ever have is the journey upon which we are. Upon which you would always be no matter how fast or tardy you move or in which direction. Just do not willingly stop the journey. As long as you live the journey must continue and there is no giving up on it.

Like the rabbit told Alice: if you don’t know where you want to go then any direction you walk is fine and you will certainly reach a place that you don’t know if you want to go if you walk long enough.

The walking part is vital in our lives. Everything emerges out of it.

Once someone asked me if all my philosophies on life and living comes from the mountains and nature and I assured him that they most certainly do.

Look at a trickling stream that emerges out from the snout of a Himalayan glacier; when it did, I am sure it did not plan nor did it have any idea of where or how it is going to go. The cliffs it would cascade from giving birth to enchanting waterfalls, gurgling brooks through the alpine meadows, sinuous trails through villages and then forming a frothing river through valleys and towns finally joining the great oceans of the world.

The entire journey happened at random yet it is perfect. We cannot plan a better journey for that little trickle from the glacier snout.

Perhaps physically it is not possible for humans to be like this trickle but mentally and spiritually we should strive to be such. To be ready to follow the fancies of nature and mind and to keep moving and forever changing; expanding to embrace horizons as well as shrink into a snowflake if necessary. Who can tell if you succeeded or failed? What could define if goals were met or not? How can we say if you lived for a cause or in vain?

All we can say is that you lived; and that my friend is more than what can be said for many of us.

If you truly lived you succeeded. Don’t give up.