Course Correct: A Restatement of Purpose
Meditation is repetition of the same discipline, thought, idea, principle, perspective or learning until it becomes second nature. Welcome to meditation my dears. Today we must remind ourselves who we are at Course Correct, what we are going for, and how that journey will look like… until constant Course Correction and its peculiar difficulties become second nature to us.
Hey friends! It has been a minute and I couldn’t be gladder to get back here. I missed you dearly while I dealt with things 😂, y’all’s are in for a good story when I’m ready.
Anyhow,
If you are new here, welcome to Course Correct. This is a place where we strongly believe that no one is too messed up to be redeemed. This is a place where we believe that our best days can still be ahead of us if we choose so.
This is a place where we believe that even the most broken minds, souls, hearts and spirits can be put back together.
This is a place where shame cannot, and will not have the final say in our lives. And thus finally, I think you can tell that Course Correct is about that inside- out work, because after trying so many self-help ‘tips’ for ‘quick results’, I personally found that one can’t skip the process. We may be special, but no one is special enough that the normal principles of life will not apply to them.
David Starr Jordan rightly observed, “There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living”.
If you’re new here, you’ll also observe that the stories told here are very personal. They are personal to the Author, and perhaps in future we shall tell the stories of others. Why very personal, and sometimes even borderline TMI stories? Because it’s the truth. The truth in everyone’s life, president or princess, a mere human being like myself or genius like you… all our stories are messy, and complex, and beautiful, and painful, and worth exploring.
Anyhow, I was explaining how Course Correct is all about that inside- out work.
Dear veterans, please indulge me today and allow me to properly welcome our new Course Correct Fam.
Dear new fam, here’s a personal story from the author about why Course Correct must be an inside out exercise:
It’s not like I haven’t tried going through the ‘tick boxes’ mode, you know, where you follow the “10 secrets” to a happy life, and another “seventeen rules” if you want to be disciplined and all. This Author tried it all, and I can say I have found myself back in the same position. I think these “tips” are like the circus. One keeps going round in circles, starting projects then stopping… starting diets then stopping… starting routines then stopping… you get the point.
It’s clear that there’s no short cut to substance. Whatever is only a performance, even a seemingly well lived life, eventually crumbles like a sink hole. You know, the ‘sink hole effect?’. A sinkhole effect is where you have seemingly firm ground, but unbeknownst to the viewer, there’s a mine beneath the ‘firm’ ground, and it’s only a matter of time before that entire ground- and everything built on it- collapses. And often such ‘collapses’ are so public, and loud and ‘rememberable’ by many, because the ‘performer’ of this perfect life, often, has usually managed to fool so many- sometimes even themselves- that they “had it under control”.
I feel like this past paragraph describes the arc of my life from late teens to twenty five. It was a race to “the top” without actual discipline or substance, and I truly got burned. You cannot fake excellence. You may manage to, but it won’t go on for long.
Okay, last quote for the day, “Time will always tell what you’ve been doing with time”. I don’t know who the author of this quote was, but there isn’t a more accurate statement- time will tell what we’ve been doing with it. If it was years of “fake it till you fool a good enough number”, it’ll still be found out. There’s no replacement for process, no replacement for substance, no replacement for true and honest excellent living.
I concluded, after years of frustration trying all these “success and discipline” rules, that Gordon McDonald in the book “Ordering your Private life” was right when he said,
“Say the right words, be smart enough to do the right things, be insightful enough to meet the right people, and one can go a long way before anyone discovers that the inner life is empty- rich in natural gifts but impoverished in the inner space from where depth and power can flow”.
Thus, this time round I am joining hands with everyone willing to try for the long haul. People unafraid to try again regardless of how many times they may fall in the process.
Course Correct is for the people who have decided that any life worth living is worth all their effprt. It is for people who have known pain and shame, but they have decided that their story will end differently, even if it is not exactly where they wish to be right now.
Course Correct is for the brave, the sad, the happy, the bruised, the scarred, the bold, the outcasts, the misfits and all the people out here who are as complex as we Course Correctors are- because we are all of those things at the same time.
Course Correct is for those who must make peace that perhaps for them to successfully build themselves, they may have to tear down the entire old house.
Course Correct will take humility. The humility to accept that we are not above the principles of time, effort and process. That we are not too good that we shall just “make it” without putting in the actual work.
Course Correct will take humility, feat reader, because it might mean starting one’s “10,000 hours” at a late age- whatever one considers late. I’m twenty six and I’ve made peace that I’ll be ready to serve more people when I’m ready. Truly ready. Seasoned. Trained. Discipled. Disciplined without faking to be a disciplined person. Perhaps when my still somewhat thirsty ego and self die. Now those are hard things, hardly measurable. It could take years.
However, I’ve been alive long enough to be humbled by life- that whatever lessons we skip learning, we shall still go back to till we get it. It doesn’t matter if it’s sorting trauma, or returning stolen goods … Nature abhors a vacuum. So every season of life skipped will have to be compensated for at some point.
I think, as Course Correctors, we’re better off just taking the humble pie today and start building right. No house built on sand stands the test of time. There’s no quick fix for the real things in life. To accept this takes humility. May you receive the grace to accept this hard truth, my dear journey mate.
Course Correct is inside-out work. There’s no short cut. This also means that to even start feeling as if we are where we’d like to be, it might take longer than we have patience.
Let me be the first to confess- I hate waiting. I hate having to be “patient” to be “great”. I wanted to be on the pedestal. I wanted all the limelight. I wanted to be seen everywhere and be adored by many, perhaps even worshipped.
Yes, the dreams of my youth were petty like this and I have no apologies for this vanity. Every human being is vain, but simply because we are doesn’t mean that all our wants will be satisfied at the speed of our vain desires. Real life is not Instagram, where you get instant gratification for a post. Here, things take time, and that’s a hard doctrine to accept.
Thus, dear Course Correctors, old and new… as we go into the 3/4 remaining section of May 2024, I pray dearly for your soul as I write this. I pray that both you and I get the wisdom to be patient. That we get the grace to accept that things will take time. That Course Correct is inside work, and it’ll take however long it needs to take for us to heal. I can only write like this to encourage you and me. Otherwise, I am just another misfit trying to feel my way through, with a prayer in her heart that she doesn’t give up too soon.
Otherwise I am just another #Gen-z/millennial born in the late nineties- late enough to qualify to be a Gen-z, but just a bit older, and mannerisms just a bit too non- Gen-z to truly fit the “Gen-z” fit, but not old enough to be a true millennial either. What a world! Even the dates of our birth misplace us from belonging to any generation in perfection! Anyhow, this is for all my mid to late twenties crew, gather here my people, we can only belong with each other 😂😂.
This is Course Correct, A Restatement of Purpose, to remind us who we are, and what we are going for- that we are getting back on track- but with understanding this time round. And the main and key understanding we need to keep in mind is that the only way we shall truly succeed will be in time. There’s no skipping of process.
May we both, you and I, get the courage, humility and bravery to keep going even when we fall apart.
I pray for resilience in both you and I, that as we approach the second half of the year, we won’t give up on any progress we’ve made. That we won’t waste that progress either, even if we have faltered in between. Let our lives- five, ten, fifty and beyond — years from now testify that we took in the humble pie, submitted to the process of building our lives from the inside out- and that it paid off.
Shalom my dearests. See you in the next set of pieces. All my love, Risper.
P.S. the next couple of articles may seem a bit odd- they are articles conceived way back when I started this blog in 2020, but due to shame of feeling as if I’d been too “publicly” inconsistent, my inner saboteur convinced me I was better off pretending the blog didn’t even exist. You know, so that people “don’t notice” that you have actually been inconsistent? The irony. You stop working so that others don’t see you stopped, but you just end up piling up more for you to do when it comes down to it. May we find the courage to pick ourselves faster and faster each time we fall.
This is not to say that I’m writing these articles out of feeling obliged. Rather, I’m so very happy to go back to each moment of conception of each of those articles, and get in touch with my creative.
To the new comer, the one last thing I didn’t mention is that in Course Correct, we believe in redeeming every moment in time still redeemable. Thus, if it’s a song unsung, a book unwritten, article unpublished, poetry unrecited, college or whatever… as long as we are alive, we are going to try and do it all, so that at the end of the day we can look back proudly, and say that we Course Corrected.
Shalom now, for real. See you in “Ugly Birds” 😜
