Saturday, June 16, 2007

Take a stand or run





From the time we are old enough to walk we find challenges placed in our paths. Sometimes we run from them, sometimes we work around them and then there are the times we meet them head on. For all men challenges vary. For some just finding and keeping a job seems to be a challenge. Some men can't seem to find big enough challenges to fulfill their needs. Other find solace in the simple challenge of day to day life. Each man has a desire to accept whatever challenges he deems to be challenge and if he chooses to ignore it that's his right too.

Hemingway wrote, "There are people who love command and in their eagerness to assume it they are impatient at the formalities of taking over from someone else. I love command since it is the ideal welding of freedom and slavery. You can be happy with your freedom and when it becomes too dangerous you take refuge in your duty. I was bored with this since I knew myself and my defects and strengths too well and they permitted me little freedom and much duty."

Regarding challenge, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood. At best, he knows the triumph of high achievement; if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

I have lost some challenges in my life and I have won some but what gives me great satisfaction in not whether I lost or won it was the fact that I chose to try. Africa was one of the greatest choices I ever made and it was filled with many challenges.

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