From the day we are born to the day we die, people will continue to place their idea of what is right, what is important and what is true before us; our parents, our friends, our teachers, our religious leaders and our governments will try to convince us as to why their path is the right one.
It is said that man has the will to become anything he sets his mind to. It is this will that brought us the airplane, the internet, the block-chain technology. It is this will that has brought us wars, fear, crime, poverty, greed and envy. Because we are the one in charge of such a powerful power, everyone wants to be the one to tell us how to use it.
Take your will to be your voting power here on steemit, for example. It is something that you can choose to use or not, it is something that you can choose to use in a certain manner or not but your friends and followers here on steemit have other plans for your voting power. They try to influence how you vote for their own benefit, they want to influence how you choose, they want to influence you.
Too many people have overtime being crushed beneath the dust and have in the process lost the ability to decide how they want their lives to be. They have handed over this responsibility to their husbands, their fathers, their friends. These people no longer control their will, or their ability to choose. They work under the assumption that the person who decides what they will do or not, has their best interest at heart and in most cases they stay silent out of fear.
In some cases, fathers and mothers have been the reason behind the timidity and fear of children. Sometimes, parents destroy the strength of will of their children, planting in them stifling ideas that will grow overtime into creepers that will entangle their minds and make it difficult for such children to develop the ability to think for themselves. The influence of their parents has molded them into something different from what nature had in mind when they were born to this earth.
It is our willpower that determines our ability to make a choice, to do what we set our mind to, to live beyond our own expectations. It is also our willpower that determines how much influence we can allow into our lives. When a person’s will power dies, like your bandwidth on steemit, you can do nothing. You are alive like your steemit blog; you have the skill, the knowledge, the methodology but you cannot do a thing; you have lost the reason for living so you just exist.
You wake up in the morning and go to the crappy job that pays you just enough to get by. You live routine lives with little or no change to your daily activities from one month to the next, you have no ambition and you have no purpose. In such a state, you have lost your will. Two things may happen, you may either just live on the darkness you have created for yourself, all your life, with no interference from the outside world or someone might come and mould you into the image he or she desires.
Like voting power or bandwidth, it is willpower that determines how successful you are. It determines how much you can achieve in your life. It determines how much you can do for the people around you. When you let yourself be used by another for their negative purposes without taking a stand, you have failed as a human being and as a member of your community. You have given away your birthright, as it may seem.
When your church leaders or your imam decide for you what your life should be like; what you should eat, how you should dress, who you should mingle with, what you should read, you have lost your individuality. Your will has been subsumed in the collective will of religious community to ensure its growth. What it will be used for, is no longer up to you.
When your government or political class decide for you, how much you will earn, what sort of jobs you are eligible for, which part of your country you can work, how success is viewed, then again, you have lost your will as an individual and have given it to keep the sovereignty of your country.
When your parents tell you what they expect you to be and you go on to fulfill their dreams at the detriment of the dreams you have locked away in the dark recesses of your heart, when their admonitions have molded you into their own image and you feel trapped within the image, you have given away your will. You have become a tool.
Is the control of another’s will wrong? It depends on how you see it. If you put a bird in cage and feed it, give it water and treat it well, is it a good thing? It is getting the best life has to offer right? Was it its choice to be in the cage? Did it come to you and asked to be placed in solitary confinement for the rest of its life?
A man who loves, respects and listens to his wife might be successful in life based on his wife’s advice or he might become a failure as a result of the same. They are men who would not travel if their wives tell them not to.
If Julius Caesar had listened to his wife, the shape of the world would probably be different today. At the same time, the advice of lady Macbeth led to his destruction.
In the three illustrations; that of the bird, Ceasar and Macbeth , one thing stands out; choice. Influence is allowed by choice. You choose to let someone influence you, control your ideas, your actions, your words. You make that choice not the other way round. When you do not make the choice and it is foist upon you by force then it is indeed a breach of your freedom. Also, we might choose wrong and come to regret letting people make decisions for us that we could have easily made ourselves as can be seen from Macbeth and Caeser’s experience.
A child who has lived under the influence of his parents tends to rebel when he gets to a certain age. In most cases, they do not do so because their parents’ influence was negative but because they want to see the world with their own eyes. They want to judge for themselves the truth of their parent’s admonitions. They want to be able to make a choice.
It is therefore, correct to say that we are all under influence and in most cases, we choose to be influenced by those who influence us. It can also be said that, sometimes, our will, our rights to choosing is taken from us by force, either by law, peer pressure, religious beliefs, health needs, or poverty. It is also finally right to say that we can break away from negative influences, if our will is strong enough to battle them. Fighting for your rights is a choice; your will is yours to use as you deem fit, if you let yourself use it.
To live fruitful lives, we must be influenced by our society, there is no escaping that. We must bow in a certain manner in order to get what we desire but… we should be careful who we give our allegiance to, who we bow to, who we surrender our wills to; for in that one act lies everything that we can become in the future.
Image Source: pixabay
Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe and stay STEEMING. Peace.
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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics
