Posts Tagged ‘dedication’
Winning Your Race
Sometimes it seems difficult to pursuit dreams when the shadows of the past darken your vision. Sometimes the vision of success is interrupted by the immediate blur from the smoke of the fires we attempt to put out hourly. Sometimes our vision, our energy, our enthusiasm becomes dark by the many adjustments you make to again remain on your path to successful endeavors.
The past can only affect your vision of the future if you are continuing to look behind you. The smoke clears as we gain clarity on our commitment to our successful objectives by focusing on the most important activity to accomplish at the moment for the ultimate accomplishment of our vision. Our vision, our energy, our enthusiasm increases like the strength of a marathon runner who is constantly adjusting to the conditions of his path, when we continue to find the opportunity in the challenge, the celebration of the next step, and the fuel to be excited about our new level of achievement.
Our challenge is to consistently fuel the hope, the commitment, and the next step with the clarity of our purpose. As God blesses us with the next step, let’s be grateful for the stress that we are challenged with for we will grow stronger in faith, in patience, and in abundance.
Failure would only be in having no enthusiasm to take the next step.
Crawl with no fear. Walk upright with confidence and clarity. Run with all the enthusiasm that God has bestowed in you with full expectation of winning your race.
Author —- Trent Fortner
Dedication to Reality Revisited
When looking for answers you have to ask good questions? When making your journey to success you have to continually draw your map to make sure the vision that you have is current and accurate.
It is imperative that we have an open mind to new realities and not have a world view that we stubbornly waste precious time fighting to excuse.
M. Scott Peck says it better than I. Enjoy.
Excerpt from ‘The Road Less Traveled’ – M. Scott Peck
….The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem solving, which must be continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious, For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world – the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions – the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map with which to navigate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung (worldview) is correct (indeed even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.
But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them. The world itself is constantly changing. Glaciers come, glaciers go. Cultures come, cultures go. There is too little technology, there is too much technology. Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing. When we are children we are dependent, powerless. As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or an infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again. When we have children to care for, the world looks different from when we have none; when we are raising infants, the world seems different from when we are raising adolescents. When we are poor, the world looks different from when we are rich. We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world, than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.
- M. Scott Peck