Expirtate the Unwanted!

No matter how much I write about it, the principle of little things adding up always fascinates me. To this day, I repeatedly find myself thinking of Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, where he dug himself to freedom after twenty years of chipping through a prison wall with a rock hammer.

For many years now, I have had this image as a sort of totem, or symbol, or intention to guide me through life. It teaches me that patience is a virtue, and that any situation–no matter how sticky it may seem–can be overcome with enough persistence.

I am seeing this transformation happen in my personal finances, which were once a no man’s land of knotty branches of ignorance speckled with a snow cover of icy hope. Over the past several years, I’ve been steadily changing that landscape into an attractive panorama, one that feels good to me 🙂

I feel that it is an incredible gift to look beyond the obvious day-to-day circumstances, to be able to see a brighter future, and to work toward it day after day, as Andy Dufresne does in the movie. Most people seem to have an obsession with their current circumstances. If they are bad circumstances, there seems to be a tendency amongst us humans (I’ve been guilty of it too!) to complain, in other words, to focus on the unwanted tangible reality instead of shifting one’s focus on what is wanted.

Your goal may seem far off in the distance. You may feel sometimes like you are trapped in, dare I say it, a prison of unwanted circumstances, just as Andy was. Yet it doesn’t matter–you can expirtate* those circumstances from your life and replace it with whatever you wish.

It requires, above all, the faith to move in that direction. You must have the courage to start chipping away at that wall, though escape seems an insurmountable distance.

With time, your perseverance will be rewarded 🙂

*I really wanted to use this word. I don’t think I ever have, yet there it was in my mind, wanting to be used. When I looked it up, I realized I was using it correctly: it means “to wipe out, to pull up by the root.”