No Second Chances
A senior college teacher once commented to me with considerable bitterness, “There are no second chances in life. Wonderful opportunities to advance myself are coming my way at the moment, but I can’t take advantage of them.” I was rather surprised at this outburst and asked him the reason. “It’s all because I rushed into taking up a job immediately after I had done my B. Sc. You see, I never did my M.Sc. Of course, I always meant to at a later stage, but somehow the circumstances were never just right for me to leave work and start studying again.” I had to agree with him that without higher qualifications one cannot aspire to higher things in life.
This is unfortunately true of about 99 percent of our society. The early part of one’s life should be devoted to intensive preparation for adult responsibilities, but most people fritter away their energies in fruitless activities, more intent on enjoying life than on giving any thought to the future. Having failed in their youth, through ignorance or negligence, to develop their potential to the full, they can seldom make a decent start in life, and even if they do, they find it almost impossible to make any progress. More often than not, they find themselves at an impasse. All doors are closed to them.
When you enter the field of life inadequately prepared for it, you cannot expect to reap a harvest if the seeds for it have never been sown. When the time has come for harvesting, you cannot then rush to sow seeds. Time once lost can never be brought back again, and once opportunities have slipped from your hands, they can never again be recaptured. Fortune only knocks once, it does not knock again.
There are few useful tasks which can be performed without preparation, for preparation equips one and gives one the tools for the job. If you try to break a stone with your bare hands you will surely fail. But if you take a pickaxe to it, and have learned how to wield it, it will only be a matter of minutes before you have smashed the stone into small pieces. Being well equipped and having the technical knowhow are indispensable to personal progress.
Only if you enter life with the requisite competence will you receive your rightful place in it. Bemoaning your losses and protesting against imagined enemies will be of no avail. It is pointless counting upon the environment to provide the necessities of life, and complaints against it are usually an expression of one’s own incapacity. They convey the desire to possess, to reach heights of honour and glory without having put in the necessary groundwork.
