You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
Rabindranath Tagore
Demanding situations in life often leave us dumbfounded and overwhelmed. All we are able to do is mull over the challenges that lie ahead of us. Inactivity paralyzes our senses and we find ourselves short of ideas on what our next course of action should be.
As is often the case with such scenarios, taking a step back is not an option anymore, either. Caught up in this dilemma, we cannot help staying put and hoping for things to take care of themselves. However, more often than not, luck is triggered by some noteworthy action on our part. We are thus endlessly stuck into this vicious circle of inaction and fake hope. This neither helps in achieving our goals nor in resolving our predicament to take us forward.
If you have a set goal, make sure you try to achieve it. Planning for it and waiting for the right moment to take the leap forward are obviously important. That said, simply staring down the path and hoping that things will fall into place on their own will not take you toward your goal; if anything, such procrastination and over-thinking only takes you away from it. There is nothing wrong with the time you invest in chalking out your plans, but it becomes kind of problematic if that is all you ever do.
Hardships are inevitable on the road leading to your dreams; they are, in fact, an indicator of a dream worth fighting for. However, at the end of the day, life is all about people who fight the odds to emerge triumphant. Nobody really remembers the ones who tried, much less those who spend a million years pondering over their next step. Success stories are always written about the people who actually withstood all the adversities that came their way.
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, social reformer and philosopher. The Bengali author, who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Gitanjali, once said: “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”