It is a gift to be able to take care of other human beings. To live a life of service and have the ability to help others means we are in a place of gratitude and good fortune in our own life. Giving to others is a cornerstone of how I chose to be.
And while I will never force my choices on another person, I will also not sit silently while injustice is being done.
I do not ask you to agree with me. I simply ask you to ask yourself something… are you making your choices, forming you decisions and constructing your beliefs based on acts of love or based on acts of fear?
If you are making them based on fear, you will never find true peace from that fear by banning people because they are different from you, vilifying them because they threaten your belief system, or casting them aside so you do not have to think about things in a different way than you already do.
Becoming self-aware is a gift. It is the ability to accept your failures, your weakness, and your shortcomings while still loving one’s self enough to know that these are but temporary stops on a very long journey.
Self-awareness requires acceptance… of yourself and of others. It requires that you break free from your fear and open your eyes, your mind and your heart to all the possibilities and live, not without fear but despite it.
Being an American can be hard. We are a big country filled with different types of people from all over the world. Our default setting as humans is the desire to feel safe, so we find ourselves subconsciously drawn to things that make us feel safe. Often, what makes us feel safe is familiarity; others who look like we look, think like we think and act like we act.
But in order to be great, we must take risks. We must risk sacrificing our safety for service, we must risk the familiar so we can expand our understanding and we must dare to act differently so that we can explore what is possible rather than simply what is comfortable.
This is not simply how I feel but how I live my life. Pushing myself to be more than I am today, challenging myself to see the world through a different lens, and stepping outside of my comfort zone and risking safety for growth.
I spent most of my life in fear, suffering from anxiety about all the things that could go wrong. I didn’t shed all those tears, fight through all that pain and risk all that sacrifice to quietly sit and watch my country make the same mistakes I did.
If you want to fight terror, fight tyranny, and fight oppression, you don’t build a wall, close off your borders and withdraw from the world. You do it by standing up and fighting based on what you believe is right. You keep your heart open even though it may be broken. You keep your head held high even though it’s tired. And you may make some mistakes and take some hits along they way, but you keep fighting… because that’s what it means to be great.
“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
– Tom Hanks, A League of Their Own
