Calendar Books by Allen James - Daily Reading - "The Journey: A Calendar Book"

Today's reading is a quote by renowned comedian, Jonathan Winters, whom many may recall as the character of the old grey haired lady, Maude Frickert in his comedy with Dean Martin:

"If your ship doesn't come in, swim out and meet it" (Winters).

Personal success most often doesn't come up and slap us in the face;  it comes with diligence and motivation. This was something comedian Johnathan Winters knew well. While it is said in a humorous manner, the quote is actually very serious. How long are we willing to wait for the perfect opportunity? How long are we willing to wait for our ship to come in?

 All too often we allow personal success to cruise by, ready for us, but not close enough for us to conveniently get to it? Yes, it would be nice to walk up the gang-plank and be greeted by the Captain as a dignitary. But what if it just isn’t going to happen?  The quote says we should go ahead and get wet! Swim out to it as soon as it gets close! Every time we watch it going away, we must wonder if it will come back. And sometimes it doesn’t. What then? We're out of luck, all because we didn’t get moving. Not a good thing for certain.
   
We’d all like to think the perfect opportunity will be awaiting us, just around the next corner. However, most of us know from experience this is rarely the case. We have to weigh our options, and then take advantage of our best opportunity.  Sometimes the cost of taking this opportunity is not being able to take the next opportunity. However, in my experience, waiting for something better usually results in having nothing. It may be a fine line, but if we’re waiting for opportunity to find us, we may be waiting for a very long time.
Taking advantage of opportunities is the opposite of procrastination. Don’t be caught sitting on the dock as the ship sails away and we're not aboard. Sometimes we will have to get wet and claw our way onto the boat like a half-drowned rat. But it may be the only way to take advantage of the opportunity.

I imagine we all have had the experience of missing out because we waited too long and the ship left without us. How often do we later wonder what we were waiting for? Yes, we’ve all been there. However, I would recommend going light on the recriminations, and learn from the experience.  How do we know it is our ship? This is a very personal question, and only we can answer it for ourselves. Not every ship which sails by or stops in is ours. Figuring out which is which is an interesting activity. But just sitting on our butt in the sand isn’t going to get us on board.  If we can figure out what we’re looking for, we can anticipate our ship, or at least be on the lookout for it. Then comes the moment of decision, do we wait and hope it comes in and docks, or do we swim out to meet it? It’s not always an easy thing to determine. By the time we figure out it is not coming in to dock, it may already be pulling away, headed off to get someone else, someone who wants to be onboard more than we did; not something we want to happen.

Thus once we have a good idea as to what we want to do, it might be prudent to keep a sharp eye out for the ship. Or, if on closer consideration, it is determined we aren’t waiting for a ship, but instead are waiting for a train, it might be time to leave the beach and find the train station. What we each want out of life we can usually manage to do, if we take advantage of the opportunities which move us in the appropriate direction. For most of the people I have read biographies of, and from my own experience, the path from where we are to where we want to be is rarely a straight line.

In how many areas of life are we waiting, passively, for something special to happen? We must take a moment to consider what we would need to make it worth swimming out to meet our ship? How good does it have to be to be worth it?  Keeping our eyes open for anything advancing us in the direction of our goals or dreams is necessary to spot our ship. Once we know how badly we want to get to it, we’ll know how far out we’re willing to swim to get to it.

Keep looking up.  : )   AJ


(www.philosiblog.com)