Photo by Andreas Fidler on Unsplash

I’ve always been very aware of the power of words – positive and negative. I try to say what I mean and mean what I say. It’s not always easy and often requires choosing words carefully, but that’s the key to clear and authentic communication – communication with others but also with yourself.
However, we all have – I definitely do – our own sayings that might not be so carefully chosen. Sometimes we make them up, sometimes we borrow them from other people and use them often – sometimes without actually meaning the words that we speak.
A week before my fortieth birthday I was talking to someone about the detailed plans for my birthday weekend. It turned out that there was a change which I didn’t like, to say the least, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I don’t think that I will ever forget the following exchange. I remember exactly where we stood, what time it was and every single word…
I will survive – I said.
Of course, you will survive… This struck me like lightening and I said:
No, no, hang on a moment. I don’t want to survive!
No, you don’t want to survive. You want to thrive – came the answer.
Exactly! And that’s what I’m going to do… I said – out loud but very much to myself.
This chat didn’t take more than 30 seconds but stayed with me for good. Almost instantly I stopped saying I survive – in any tense, in any context and in any language. In fact, I might have not realised the impact of this phrase if the quoted conversation wasn’t in English. Over the last eighteen months or so I got more and more convinced that it wasn’t just a figure of speech. My friend and I had been using this phrase for years. It was like our personal joke, but I think it was shaping my reality more than I realised.

There’s always been that wild and crazy part of me striving for greatness, for truth… for hearing people… for seeing the opportunity, the potential – in people, places, organisations, situations… – and wanting to develop it and build on it; that part of me ready to go against the current, taking the risk, not caring for the price to pay – whether it was time, energy, money… – as long as there was something meaningful and great to create or grow; that part of me that really wanted to make a difference. For a long time, that part of me was awfully shy and often pacified by the one saying You’ll survive. Over the last five years, the balance of these forces has been changing dramatically.
It is like an inner battle and now the survival is being kicked out most of the time. There is no more acceptance of an average, mediocrity. No more acceptance of a maintenance mode. No more thinking ‘It will work out somehow’. I guess that this is some impact of Fr James Mallon’s book, Divine Renovation, on my personal life. What this book did to me in the first place was making me a rebel against the current state of the Church. It caused a very strong sense of dissatisfaction with business as usual and at the same time gave me hope that it could be different. Writing this, I’ve realised that it caused the same dissatisfaction with the maintenance or should I say survival mode in my personal life, too. That’s the feeling which you get when you get to a point when you see so clearly that things are going in the wrong direction, that you need to change the course, and you just know that you don’t want to or even can’t go back. There might not be a clear path ahead – it might still be covered with snow – but you know that you can’t go back on the old one.
It’s all a work in progress…
God gives us life – life to the full, not a long-term survival! He wants us to thrive! He wants us to be happy and satisfied – not just in eternal life but in this one, too. It doesn’t mean there is no more struggle, that everything is nice and easy and that you live happily ever after in a fairy tale style. It’s much more about the reason why I’m here and about knowing the purpose of my life and my being. It’s about doing things because I know who I am and why I am, rather than doing things that will give some sense to my existence. There is a fundamental difference between the two.
Now, the plan is to thrive and help others thrive, too…