Courage to Change

"Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
–The road not taken by Robert Frost

When failures, mistakes, defeats and losses hit us sprawling on the ground, sometimes, it is better that we don’t hit back but instead, we roll with the punches. It pays to wait for the bell to ring in our favor so that we can go back in our corner, regain our lost strength and use our hindsight to see where we need to adjust and change our attack tactics. Forgive me for the metaphors and similes; I hope you are following me on this one.

They say that everything is changing except change. True. If there is something that is constant in this world, it is change, and everything else changes. Redeeming yourself from your miseries, failures, defeats, and losses requires the courage to change. You need to muster enough courage to really change for the better.

Learning from these ugly situations could be frightful at times. Especially when hesitation sets in, wills begin to tether, and doubts plague our faith. There is also the fear of making another mistake that can freeze us in our predicament and causes us to let just fate takes its course. I remember a noted psychologist who was imprisoned in one of the Nazis concentration camps during the last world war who observed that those who survived those ‘death camps’ were actually the people who have muster enough courage just to hang-on until they are finally set free and can return to their comfortable lives. The difference, he said, for those who. who survived and did not not is their perspective. He further adds, which he discovered while observing the changes that transpired on people who used to live comfortable lives and were made to suffer because they belonged to a different race, that anything can be taken from a man except one thing -the freedom to choose his fate by having the courage to change his perspective over a very unpleasant predicament or the worst of human conditions.

Martin Luther King Jr. had the courage to change his perspective, and so it changed the course of American history and put the idea of equality in a right perspective. That kind of courage is found within. Seek it, and you will find it. It is in the recesses of your mind. It is there lurking and waiting if you are willing to tap it. The path of to self redemption begins when you have learned to accept your situation and who you are; and it is effected in full swing when you muster enough courage to change your perspective, yourself, then your fate.