Wake Up and Drive Your Boat
I have been listening to a lot of inspirational speeches, from Tony Robbins, to Mel Robbins, to Oprah Winfrey. Topics ranging from how to live in a beautiful state, to stop procrastination, to keep dreaming big, bigger than you think it is possible and be the best you could possibly be. I can’t deny the fact that every time, I listen to them, I feel pumped, feel what they say really resonated with what I believe all my life, but somehow, most of the time, for most of us anyway, there is always a disconnection between what we know we should do, and us actually taking any action or enough action to put ourselves to the work. There is always some sort of excuse why we don’t take actions we know will change our lives and inevitably, it pretty much always have something to do with past, with others, with why it is not something we can change.
Wayne Dyer has a famous quote about “wake up and drive your boat”. This metaphor is really about recognizing past is merely nothing but the marks of what has happened, recognizing what past is, and understanding past has nothing to do how you should proceed “now”. The quote goes like this:
One of my favorite metaphors illustrates the importance of recognizing the past for what it is. Imagine that you are on a boat headed north at around forty knots. As you stand on the stern, looking down into the water, three questions come to mind.
First, you ask yourself, What is the wake? The answer is that the wake is nothing more than the trail left behind.
The second question is, What is driving the ship? The answer is that the Present Moment Energy that you are generating through the engine is driving the ship.
Finally, you ask yourself the most important question: Is it possible for the wake to drive the ship? The answer is no, of course, for the wake is just a trail that is left behind. It can never drive the boat!
Now imagine that the boat is your life, and the wake is all the things that have happened in the past—what your body is like, what your parents were like, where you were in the birth order, how your mother treated you, whether your father was an alcoholic, and anything else.
Most people live with the illusion that their wakes are “driving” their lives—which is absolutely impossible. In order to nourish your soul, you must be able to “get out of the wake.”
It is so easy to blame others, blame the past, blame everything that’s out of our control that we are where we are and why we are not happy with anything. But all that is just us staring at the wake, and feeling like the victim of who knows what. We quite often lose ourselves in this kind of self pity and lose sight on where we are heading to, forgetting we are the ones controls the heading of our lives.
We, at the end of the day, are the director of our own movie. We, are the only ones responsible of our happiness. Tony Robbins encourages everyone to take control of our own mind, and “choose to live in a beautiful state”.
I am in, are you?
