What do you dream of? What's my place in the Universe? Common questions for many of us in the world today. We all want a place here, a sticker that gives us a name. But, why is it that most of us think that we have to be something other people see as special?
What about all the basic things that give us a very special place in the Universe. Parents, teachers, firefighters, police officers, soldiers are all very special people. Almost everybody agrees on that point. Yet, we never take a closer look at what makes a lot of these people so special.
All we look at is things like their courage, strength and ability to ignore the small things and push for the big. What about those times when these people are sitting alone on the bed or standing in the shower, crying.
The world today seems to think that if your a hero or you're special, you don't show emotion. My wife, when we first met, had a very hard time with this. She would get stressed out, upset or something would bother her and she'd keep it all boxed up inside, except for the anger. Not to say it isn't okay to be angry, but you've got to let it all out to really have release.
I think that a lot of people now have a tendency to see strength as blocking it all out and marching forward. Don't you think that Abraham Lincoln sometimes sat crying on his bed, Martin Luther King had doubts and would need his wife to hold him, Gandhi needed some time alone to cry... These people that we see as "Great" human beings, they had emotions too.
They weren't always the "strong" people we read about or now see in a video. Everyone from Jesus to the Firefighters of 9/11 have cried and felt like giving up.
It's that ability to show yourself for who you are and still march on that makes you a hero, not bottling it all up inside and marching on.
To wrap it all up in a neat little package, take some time in the day to cry when you need to cry, scream into that pillow, zone out or write in your journal. It's that release that allows you to march on into the face of adversity, not holding onto it and using the anger. Anger is like caffeine, it's a quick boost of energy. But love, tears, hope, release; those are the foods that will strengthen you for the long haul.
Joe-You should email this to a magazine or newspaper. It brings some people down to reality and helps them see the "heroes" as normal people like the rest of us. That was a very good article.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. It reminds me of this poem I read awhile back. It was written during the Civil Rights era in the US, and it was a Black is Beautiful and Black Power activist that wrote it. During that time, there was a lot of art intended to build up the self esteem of black people by saying stuff like "You aren't just the descendants of slaves, you are the descendants of African Kings and Queens, blah blah blah. Trust, there was a ton of it.
ReplyDeleteSo in response, this poem was saying something about, "My ancestors were average. If they were alive today, they would be average; they would be janitors and garbage men and postal workers. And I love them for it."