Don’t let the train of life pass you by. You are meant to board it… even if it means having to run passionately just to get in. With passion, the obstacles, the challenges and the adversities only make the journey more exciting and accomplishments even more thrilling. God made the life eternal not because he wanted us ...to take it for granted or consider it without much value, or postpone it to tomorrow. He made it endless, so that we could dare to take risks, make mistakes to learn from, and live life to the hilt in the top gear. Life is not forever… there are no tomorrows in it…all that we have are this today…and more precisely, this moment! If you miss it, you miss it forever. Wake up… Allow yourself to be taken over by the storm called passion…and start tasting the joy of living.

Passion- Index of life:

Whether you are an ordinary person or a celebrity, you can do without passion only if you can do without life because it is passion alone that determines the extent to which you are alive.

People say every cigarette reduces your life span by an hour. That could indeed be true. But truer is the fact that an hour spent doing something unwillingly has already subtracted an hour from your life. Life is not a collection of days you manage to live through, but of ‘todays’ that you live passionately to the hilt.

People who lack passion feel that if they could get this promotion, or that kind of a bank balance or get rid of some health problem, they will be happy. But the fact is that those whom they find extremely happy usually have similar problems, if not more serious ones. We human beings, like any piece of iron, can propose to finish ourselves in two ways: we may rust ourselves out or we may simply wear ourselves out. Rust looks ugly; wearing out brings shine!

Value of life: How valuable would diamonds be, if they were as common as pebbles on the road? Their value is only because they are rare and need the ceaseless effort required to mine and cut them to shape. Value of your own life, in a similar way, comes not from your achievements, but from the quality of passion with which you are still making ceaseless efforts today to make it shine further. Musicians, painters, scientists, inventors, authors and others who are creatively living their lives are cut off from thoughts of any monetary concerns, like “how much will this fetch me?” or “is it worth the royalty I am going to eventually earn?” The mind is instead focused on enjoying the excitement of responding to the challenge at hand.

Sudha Chandran, the Bharatanatyam dancer, who lost her right leg below the knee, and persevered with her passion for dancing through pain, blood, tears and doubts, stormed back to life as a well-known dancer and television actress.

In spite of nature denying him the use of his physical body, Stephen Hawking, the author of the seminal book, A Brief History of Time, is considered the most important theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein. So severely handicapped is his body that he takes eight to 15 minutes to compose his answers to audience’s questions by using a computer cursor with his crippled right hand, spelling out each word letter by letter.

The world is replete with examples of people who have kept the flame of passion alive against all odds.

Timely action is the key: There are two ways to manage your life; to cope with its problems and consequent stresses, or to work towards overcoming them. None of the two is sufficient in itself. We need the first while we are in the process of the second. But for some, the first may sometimes be tempting enough to get stuck in, which may allow the stresses to increase till they go beyond one’s coping abilities. For example, it may often be tempting to get stuck in your religious rituals to run away from the desired actions to avert an unpleasant happening. Though this may distract you from the problems in life and help you in protecting your inner peace from stressful thoughts of impending threat, but in the absence of the desired action, you are losing the opportunity to put into practice the wisdom of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’

You deserve it!: The universe has only one purpose—to plant desires in our mind and help us fulfill them. It helps us progressively recover our divinity in the process. Paula Horan, the well-known reiki master, says: “It is indeed not the ocean’s fault if we approach it with a teaspoon.” There is only one thing that you can do to be able to ask—redefine your goals in terms of giving and connect yourself to whatever kind of ‘giving’ inspires you. Convince yourself that you deserve to ‘give’ and be ‘given’ whatever you ask for. Have a role model in your life—a person who has already arrived in an area of your interest both in terms of contribution and achievement. And you will be surprised that he could reach where he has, on the strength of only those qualities that you possess or can develop even today. The secret of the existence of a gap that exists between your role model and you is that he ceaselessly believed even in times of adversity that he deserved and hence was highly willing to make efforts to hone his talents.

Notice your wishes: How do you pluck a flower? You notice it, you wish to have it, you walk towards it and then pluck it when it is in your hand’s reach. Similar is the case with achieving anything in life. If there is something that you are feeling pained about or a pleasure you want to move towards—notice your wish, begin to walk towards it, keep at it till you arrive at it, and pocket it when you arrive close enough to it.

However, we fail to take these simple steps.

• We often don’t notice our wishes. Often our attention is not on our dreams but on something else or on just getting by. If at all we notice what we want, we often simply don’t acknowledge and honour our wishes or dreams.

• If at all we acknowledge it as a wish, we don’t begin our journey towards it because we doubt whether it is worth doing so—we either secretly fear the hard work involved and/or doubt our ability and luck to be able to do so. What we find easier is to disown our responsibility, and instead expect what we want from others and/or criticise and blame others for not giving us what we want.

• We don’t keep at it even if we care to begin. And among those who do begin and manage to walk towards it, many don’t care to see whether their efforts will be enough to make them reach the goal

• We stretch our hand to pluck the flower before arriving at it. Often people don’t show persistence and lose patience and abandon their efforts when they, in fact, may only be just a few steps away. Or they may become too complacent thinking that they have almost arrived and relax their efforts. We ignore the feedback we are getting from the universe in terms of thoughts and feelings from within, and the circumstances from without.

Accelerate growth: Growth comes from making yourself progressively more and more passionate and competent, and by stepping up your contribution to society. Life is indeed meant for ‘giving’ and enjoying that too. It has absolutely no other purpose because whatever we try to take from it will have to be given back some day. It will not stick to us. Everything is bound to be given back; but when we give it willingly we do not miss the joy of doing so. Paradoxically, whenever we wish to hold on to life we lose it and when we tend to give it away to others, we live on. Whatever and whenever we give, we, in fact, give to no one else but to ourselves only

Discover and live your passion! This is the only thing you are here for.