When we are going through different transitional stages in our lives, we often experience shifting mental conditions as well. When we have a big obstacle or goal we want to get over or accomplish, it may seem daunting for us. We begin to think that the world is closing in on us because of the steps we have to take to accomplish these goals. However, like with everything in our mind, we often inflate what is actually true. We make too much of what it is that we have to do and we think of all the different ways we can do something wrong. This leads us to a condition of ‘mental paralysis’.

In the picture above, it states, “Mental Paralysis: The act of creating logical excuses to put off doing what you need to get done.” This is true in one aspect of mental paralysis but there’s more to it than just this. Mental paralysis in one major aspect consists of the act of overthinking about the mistakes which can occur from the things we have to get done. We keep thinking, “What if I do this wrong? What if this goes wrong? What if that goes wrong?” When we have this mentality, we end up not doing anything at all. While we don’t experience any failure or mishaps because we didn’t take action, we didn’t experience any progress or success either. Sometimes, stagnation is worse than failure. The only way we learn is through failure. We don’t learn anything when we keep on succeeding at everything that we do. At some point, we have to grow and venture into other things in our lives to continue learning and becoming as knowledgeable and diverse in our skills and knowledge as we possibly can. If we are doing the same thing for 15-30 years, we’re not truly progressing. We may be comfortable and doing good but we’re not growing any further. We are just doing the same thing and listening to the same thing over and over again. We are living in a bubble. If we don’t come out of that bubble, external circumstances will burst that bubble and we won’t be prepared. We can’t just conform to one mode but we have to keep progressing and evolving spiritually, mentally, and physically.

Certain things will enter our life which will set us back. We may experience a shift in our financial or health conditions and we will have to tend to it immediately. If we don’t put ourselves out there and don’t allow ourselves to fail, the Most High will put things into our path which will set us back in order for us to not only experience those untimely changes but to understand that these are things which are going to occur regardless of our decisions and are necessary for us to grow.

It is not the end goal which we should solely be focused on. We have to focus on the road which is to take to us to that end goal because it is through these roads where we actually learn how to navigate this life. If we are to be teleported to our destination, we don’t learn how to get to that destination. If we are left in the middle of the road, we are going to be completely lost on how to get to that destination. We don’t know how to navigate life if we are given everything in life. This is why we eventually have to step out of our comfort zones and be by ourselves. This is not to say that we have to just jump out of our homes and be homeless to experience hardship. If that is in the cards for us to experience, we will experience this regardless of what we do. We can still experience hardship even if we have our things in order. We don’t have to be homeless to experience hardship. Losing our job, our connection with family and friends, our car, can all occur and we are still living under a roof and have food readily available to us. For some of us, homelessness may occur as a form of a test. None of us knows what tomorrow can bring. The Most High can take our home away from us or even harden the hearts of our landlord or our family to kick us out of our home. We have to stay on our p’s and q’s in order to be readily strong and resilient to be able to take on whatever challenge or hardship is thrown in our way. These tests are like potholes in the road. Our road may become topsy-turvy and difficult to navigate when passing through these potholes. Shit, our tire may even burst from a sharp edge on one of these potholes and causes us to completely stop in place to repair our vehicle to then move forward onto the road. We have to stay strong mentally and spiritually because we don’t know what tomorrow may bring. There truly is no such thing as “tomorrow”. What we have is the life that the Most High gives us for the moment. It is through his mercy that we keep living on past this moment and further on. All that we can do is to follow the commandments and to do the best we can to improve and be better today than the previous day to not make the same mistakes as we did before. We can’t force something to be when it is not meant to be. If it is meant to be, the Most High will make those avenues available to accomplish what you seek.

Once again, it is not the end goal that we have in our hand at the end which lets us learn but it is the road to it that makes us learn and what truly molds us to become better. This road can either make or break a person. When our tire bursts in the middle of the road, one person may either give up and juststay stuck on the road and wait for someone to come along and help them up while another person may fight on and repair that tire and get back up and running on their own. It is very easy to give up and cave in from the pressure. You may have some shelters or people who will support you and help you back up but you won’t feel good about yourself because you know that you’re not doing any of the heavy lifting and you’re just letting everyone help you up. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have anyone help you and get you back on your feet but you feel bad when you end up becoming reliant on others to support you and to keep you up on your feet when you are not doing any work on your end. We have to keep on going because life is not going to stop for us. The world is going to keep going on regardless of our condition. We can’t bury our heads in the sand and just expect everyone around us to lift us out of it. Work must be done on our end to learn from our mistakes and to get back up when we are brought down by life.

It cannot be stressed enough how important it is for us to fail. It is ok for us to slip up and do the wrong thing; depending on what it is. This is the only way we learn and grow from our mistakes. However, just because we make mistakes, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to learn from it. People can just keep making mistakes over and over again and they never learn from it. Some people just want to stay in that state of continual mistakes because it’s easier to just sit back and be a fuck-up and be in the gutter instead of picking yourself up and making things better for yourself. This is because it takes responsibility and personal accountability of one’s own mistakes. It is easy to be in a continual state of wrongdoing because you can point the finger at everyone else for your mistakes. We have no one to blame but ourselves for our mistakes. When we fuck up, it is us who have to take the blame for fucking up. It is not our brother or sister or mother or father or partner or friends fault that we decided to make a decision that we knew was going to lead to disaster for us. We have to be circumspect and be considerate of what we say and do before we speak and act. If we just go off of impulses, we are leading our life through the road of chaos. Proper understanding and the scriptural construct of wisdom and discernment acts as a buffer against our own impulses because it gives us the map to navigate this life. If we do screw up, it is up to us to get back up and learn from our mistakes to do better moving forward.

This leads me into my ultimate point; that being that we won’t know what it is that we need to work on if we are not putting ourselves out there to experience life. If we don’t try, we will never fail and yet we will never succeed. We miss every chance at success and growth when we pass up on every opportunity to become better. There is no such thing as a perfect person, a perfect basketball player, a perfect guitarist, a perfect writer, a perfect painter, a perfect football player, etc. The most talented people only got to where they are at because they allowed themselves to fail so that they knew what they had to work on and used this understanding to grow and become greater in perfecting their gifts.

I know that those of us who are perfectionists hate to fail. I know this first hand because I am a perfectionist myself; to my own detriment mentally at times. I can harp on the littlest things that I did wrong which can help me to grow and be better at what it is that I’m doing later on or it could hinder me because I spend too much time worrying about what I did wrong. We should be our own worst critic to help push us to be better moving forward. If we are doing it just to simply bash ourselves and we are not figuring out the right way to fix our mistakes then self-criticism will do us no good. At that point, it’d better serve us to have someone in our corner who can offer external criticism and provide us with a solution to be fix our mistakes and improve.

We should expect the best out of ourselves because that is what pushes us forward. We can’t expect ourselves to be perfect and then not make another attempt when we make a mistake. There is a difference between high expectations and perfectionism. High expectations give us the leeway to fail and yet learn from it to progress to becoming the highest version of ourselves. Perfectionism sets the bar at such a high level and that if we don’t reach it on the first try then we harp on ourselves for not getting it right the first time. We should aim to have high expectations for ourselves instead of falling into that perfectionist mindset because the more we think that we have to get things perfect the first time, the more we will rob ourselves of the opportunity to learn and move forward from our mistakes.

Mental paralysis is the one thing that truly proves that it is us who can impede our own progress. We cannot stress too much over the possibility of making mistakes because we are always going to make a mistake no matter if we actually do make a mistake or not. The reason why I say this is because when we are perfectionists, we’d still find something to pick and prod at to make it out to be a mistake because we didn’t do this right or we didn’t do that right. So we shouldn’t stress over making a mistake because we are going to make mistakes no matter what because we are of the flesh. We are bound to make mistakes. We shouldn’t fear mistakes but we should embrace it because it is from this that we learn and grow.

In closing, we should avoid developing this state of mental paralysis because it will only cause us to backslide and not improve. We have to accept failure and use it as a tool to become better. It is the only way in which we grow. Making mistakes don’t feel great. It is not something to be proud of but it is what will propel us forward once we learn from it and use it as a tool to build up our temple to be strong and durable to last this life.

With that being said, I thank you for your time and for viewing the content. All Praises be to the Most High Yahweh Elohim and the Son Yahweh Ben Yahweh. Peace and Blessings.

-GP