I read this last night before I went to bed and I thought I would share it.
It’s an excerpt from Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.
Entry #1: Heading Down the Glory Road
Are you a coward? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weight about 190 pounds, fluent in English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person, 17, rue Dante, Nice 2me etage, appt. D.
I probably wasn’t more than eleven years old when I first read Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road. It became my bible throughout my adolescence. Everyone has a bible, it’s just not always the same book. I might have forgotten everything else in this sci-fi novel, but that one paragraph would forever capture me.
It was an ad placed in the personals specifically for the story’s main character. His name is Evelyn Cyril Gordon. You can’t even begin to imagine how wonderful it was to read of a hero whose name is Evelyn when your name is Erwin. He would later upgrade to Oscar, and that was good for me too.
I didn’t match the ad in any way, but it didn’t matter - that was my person ad. They didn’t know it, but they were looking for me. I desperately wanted to find myself on that glory road, regardless of the danger and in spite of all the small detail t hat I was a coward. Even then I had a sense of destiny. We all do. But we don’t all do something about it.
If you’re presently a coward desperately trying to avoid any stress, unnecessary pressure or unforeseen danger, you might call it a design flaw, but we humans are most alive when we passionately pursue our dreams, live with purpose, and have a sense of destiny. Again, if you’re currently a cynic, skeptic, or pessimist, you might not appreciate the fact that as Martin Seligman points out in Learned Optimism, we thrive when we are optimistic about the future. It seems failure is no match for the person who believes in the future. When we see failure as personal, pervasive, or permanent, we become paralyzed.
Bottom line: we cannot live the life of our dreams without an irrational sense of destiny.
And all of us have dreams.
More than that, all of us need dreams.
Some of us sadly are just sleeping through them.
All of us long to become something more than we are. We are driven to achieve, moved to accomplish, fueled by ambition. It burns hotter in some than in others, but it is within all of us. We’re all searching for our unique purpose, our divine destiny, or simply a sense of significance or some measure of success. When we are optimistic about the future, we find the energy to create it.
We may disagree violently about what success is; we may even change our own minds about what makes our lives actually significant. But all of us are united in our desperate attempt to make a future for ourselves. We all desperately want to achieve something, to accomplish something; we just don’t know what. Worse than that, we don’t even understand why? Yet that doesn’t stop us from searching.
No comments:
Post a Comment