MY PATH IS BLOCKED…

by Quoc on Apr.14, 2008, under Personal

…. I find myself driving down a quiet road on the way home… Ahead of me, I see a man standing in the middle of the road; his back is turned away from me. I continue driving slowing down as I approach him hoping he’ll notice me and get off the road to let me pass… He doesn’t.

I find myself a few feet from him… I can’t go any further… I roll the window down and loudly project my voice to him, “hey, get out of the way so I may pass.” The man slowly turns around. I find myself looking into the face of myself… His eyes melancholy and lost… His face looks strained as if he is trying to figure some complex mathematical function to answer one of life’s most perplexed questions…

I realize a lot of the time when traveling on the path of life that the person that most often blocks me from moving forward… is myself… I need to learn to get out of the way of myself.

I heard a similar story from a friend and was taken aback at how much I was able to relate to it… I find this very short story simple yet deeply profound and illustrates so eloquently how I feel sometimes when I am stuck on stupid being self loathing, self-deprocating and selfish and self centered! I took that story and made it something of my own…

Cool stuff… My but I feel like an artist expressing from the soul for the first time in a long time.

Quoc

1 Comment for this entry

Dave
April 17th, 2008 on 5:11 AM
Hey Quoc!

I’m sure that if you were to have looked in your rearview mirror to see what it was that was propelling you down the “road of life” you would have seen yourself only this time the look on your face would have been one that was eager and hopeful for what lies ahead. Its true that sometimes you will find yourself “trapped” between these two aspects of yourself. Wisdom comes when you learn to accept that the future can be terrifying since we never know what we may have to face and that the past can appear so much brighter than we may have perceived it at the time but that in either event the path forward, into the unknown, is the only true path that may lead to fulfilling your true potential.

Looking back will allow you to truly know which choices that you made in your life were the ones that gave you true joy. Unfortunately this is usually only something that we understand after the fact. When faced with the choice we choose based on what we feel, what we want, and what we think we know, none of which provides any guarantees that our decision will be the right one for us at that time. But we still keep on making decisions. That is part of our free-will. Some decisions will be made more because of what we want rather than on what we feel or what we think we know. Some will be made more because of what we feel rather than what we want or what we think we know. And some will be made based more on what we think we know than what we want or what we feel. As you can see, none of the ways that we tend to make decisions is likely to produce a “right” or “correct” answer in every or even most situations. And yet we, the human race, seem to have prospered more than suffered. Though it is true that there have been some magnificent cases of suffering produced through some terribly wrong decisions made by individuals as well as groups of people over the extent of our history. There have also been amazing feats of prosperity and kindness that have been achieved through the decisions of individuals as well as groups of people throughout our history. I believe that if you take an objective look at the decisions that you have made you will find that the ones that have produced acts of kindness, and proven helpful to others far outweigh those which have caused harm or intentionally inflicted pain on others.

You are human. You have the same wants and desires as all humans, to be accepted, to be happy, to be appreciated, to be loved, and to love others. You will make mistakes, and blunders and face set-backs as we all do. I accept you for who you truly are, mistakes, blunders, set-backs and all. I have faith in you. I have faith in Quoc Lam. You are a good person. I have faith in you.