LESSON FROM A FRIEND

You remember my very good friend Gabriel from the other piece? There is something that he used to say all the time when we had to eat together way back in Senior High School which I found to be very funny. When we were in Senior High School, we used to go to the dinning hall together and normally brought our food to the dormitory to "garnish" it before we ate. As I was a glutton then, I always wanted us to "gather" more food but he would jokingly say to me, "don't let your eyes be bigger than your stomach" because probably he knew I was being greedy and knew we could not eat that much. I always laughed it off and took more food only to waste it at the end of the day. Today, I would like to make reference to this "funny" remark because it taught me a great deal. Greed is not a good thing. A friend of mine was telling me that most of Africa's problems would be solved if we stopped being greedy. Let me leave this discussion for another day. I was looking at his remark from this perspective:
We all set our sights on attaining greatness. No one has aims of settling for anything less in life. In doing so; in our hopes of attaining greatness, we should not set for ourselves "unrealizable" dreams, dreams that we know cannot see the light of day. We should not let our "eyes be bigger than our stomachs". We all have dreams and there is nothing more satisfying than seeing your dream being realized. In the same vein, we also have our limits and shortcomings despite having other faultless attributes. We should know our limits so as not to give ourselves undue pressure. I am not in any way saying that we should not dream big but in considering the forces of life and the effects they can have on even our little actions and inactions, we should take a laid-back approach when setting certain goals for ourselves. More often than not, we fail to consider the components of our dreams and how they would pan out. We sometimes tend to make "our eyes bigger than our stomachs". We normally do not put into consideration the hard work, small beginning, sacrifice and determination we need to put in to reach our goals. We only have our eyes set on the "prize" and normally when you are so keen on "winning" without considering the eventualities of life, we end up missing the mark. In this light therefore, we should strive to take  life a day at a time. We must first crawl, learn to stand, walk and finally run. We may all be pursuing the same dream but there sure is no deadline for completion. Take your time and accomplish your  dreams at your own pace. We are dream-fulfillers. Always have that in mind. Welcome to the month of MARCH. This is Edwin Oko Lamptey and this is a RANDOM AFRICAN THOUGHT. More at randomafricanthoughts.blogspot.com