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"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”
Hi Thinking Mechanicians,
We hope you are well and your thoughts are empowering you to live a prosperous life.
We are going to jump straight into the learning. The inspiration for this post came from a Uber driver that the Thinking Mechanics crew had a pleasure of riding with. We will call him Ted. Ted was a great guy and explained that he was now a retired stonemason. He talked about the fact it was a trade that was not in massive demand anymore but was a skill he loved very much. It was interesting to listen to Ted’s story. The Thinking Mechanics crew ensured to inspire Ted to pursue his obvious passion and although he is retired he could potentially provide online courses to help others learn the the same skill. This provided Ted some “food for thought” as he had not considered this before.
It was after providing the word of encouragement (and what we hope to be a pilot light of inspiration) to Ted that the Thinking Mechanics crew gave themselves a nugget of self-created inspiration.
“You know what Ted...” started the Thinking Mechanics crew “...we are not too dissimilar to you”.
“How’s that?” asked Ted.
“Well…” the Thinking Mechanics crew continued “...we have started a journey to transform our life” at which Ted responded “really?” sounding quite interested.
“Yep….” we continued “...we have started our own website and we hope one day we can provide inspiration and motivation to others to change their life by first transforming how they think about themselves and the experiences they have in their life”.
Ted sounded genuinely impressed “that sounds great” he said, but then asked a good question “how is that similar to stonemasonry??”.
“That’s a good question Ted…" we responded “...well, before we can help anyone else we need to help ourselves. It’s almost like we have become stonemasons of our own life. We are chipping away at the big rock with jagged edges and seemingly no structure to it to eventually reveal a work of art that are our dreams manifested as our life".
Without sounding like we are blowing our our trumpet too much after hearing our own comment to Ted we realised how truthful what we said is. We can look at our own lives as one big lump of rock. Inside is the sculpture representing our dreams and purpose. To get to the sculpture we need to start chipping away at the big rock. It’s not easy at the start. Chipping away at the rock at the very start seems like we are not really making any big impact on the big rock. But with time, consistency in action and some good old determination the rock starts taking some shape. We can actually see that our actions are having an impact. Change is happening.
It is such an interesting illustration as a parallel to what we experience when we decide to change our lives. The journey of transforming our lives by pursuing a dream, a mission, or a cause that may have seemed out of reach for a long time can seem like nothing is working when we first start out. It’s like the big rock of our current life seems to remain the same no matter how hard we hit it with a metaphorical hammer and chisel.
Like Michelangelo said - “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”. Each one of our lives is like a “statue” in the making. The issue is encountered if we stop “chipping away’". That we think “this can’t change” or “my life will always be this big rock”.
The Thinking Mechanics crew are now chipping away. We are stonemasons of our lives right now. We will not stop. We will keep going to become the statue that is the God-given purpose we have. We then want to give back what we have received into our lives to inspire others to take the necessary action to “carve out their life purpose statue”.
Remember, all you need to do in life is to chisel and keep chipping away. The statue is in there ready to be revealed : )
Until next time - think well and think good.
Blessings from the Thinking Mechanics crew : )