This morning, I had a question from a community member: “I’m stuck in a job. I am not passionate anymore. But I can’t quit because of the salary. What should I do?”.
This is not the first question I had. More often than you might believe, I heard someone said: “I have no other options than to carry on!”
Are you in the same situation?
Remind yourself of the story of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach. Or if you’ve not read it, let me share it with you now.
He loves to fly. And fly high. Thrilled by the speed and the pleasure of flying alone. “And this kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds.” Yes, apparently, he is not one like other seagulls!
His mother asked why it was so hard for him to be like the rest of the flock. His father said: “You must study, then study food, and how to get it. This flying business is all very well, but you can’t eat […] Don’t forget that the reason to fly is to eat”!
Has he ever pursued his dream to fly? Felt in darkness of the danger of doing it? Has he ever, one day, surrendered? Told himself again that “I’m a seagull like any every other seagull”? Would he finally choose the “work-saving low-altitude flying”? Instead of flying high in the sky just for the thrill of loving it? Did one day he feel better “for his decision to be just another one of the flock”? Listen to the story and get inspired.
You and me, the same, might be flying in a flock. We search for the security and safety of our lives. All others will tell us, as the flock told Jonathan seagull. “Life is the unknown and the unknowable. Except that we are put into this world to eat. To stay alive as long as we possibly can.”
I did for a long time wonder how to stay in a job I was not passionate about, for security, to be approved, and to be “another like every other”.
But I doubt that one day, for you and for me, “time has come for another to begin”. And as said Ernest K. Gann, “I suspect that all of us who visit the world of Jonathan Seagull will never want to return”.
Get inspired by the story. Who knows, one day, we discover the “real Jonathan Seagull, who lives within us all”?
Listen to the free audiobook below
Read the free book in pdf here
Read more: 6 easy ways to be happier: How to practice mindfulness in eating