All ships are safe in the harbor, but that’s not what ships were made for.
How many times in your life have you wanted to do something great for yourself or others, but instead you walked away with a million and one reasons for why you didn’t? It could something as simple as you wanted to quit a bad habit. Maybe exercise or eat better. Perhaps it was to just to be more social and do something as little as saying hi to people more often. Maybe it was getting back to a friend you haven’t been ignoring, but you felt too busy. The examples here are endless. Everyone has a better course in life they wanted to take, but didn’t because of those reasons.
You’re not alone in this. Actually, there’s a religious saying that you don’t have to be religious to understand. It goes, “The Devil will come for you when you’re at your highest point.” For many of us, that highest moment is when we truly wanted to do something better, but then there’s a voice in your head that is somehow able to say exactly what you want to hear. It has the most convincing and persuasive arguments ever for why you just can’t or shouldn’t. Before you know what’s happening, you’re talked right out of it and you forgo the scary unknown for the comfortable familiar. The moment you do that voice suddenly stops and leaves you alone, right up until you try to make something of yourself again.
Now once more, you don’t have to believe in something like Satan to understand what I’m talking about. If you prefer you could call it self-doubt. Anxiety. Trauma. This self preservation from fear is something meant to keep us exactly where we are and when that’s a bad place, you can bet a force like Satan would want to keep you there forever. Now if you don’t believe in fantastical concepts like good and evil, then why else would we self sabotage ourselves like this? Well, it’s to protect ourselves.
You see when life threatens us, or worse, when it harms us, we reach new lows and our highs become any effort we make to get out of that pit. This desire to change is love, but why would someone have love in a world that has left them hopelessly damaged? That has victimized them? Well that’s certainly the kind of logic a being like Satan would want you to have or if you prefer, simple survival. Makes perfect sense. You did something and received a painful lesson. So why act on that again? It would be senseless. You’ve heard that voice. The one telling you why you shouldn’t or can’t do that thing. So then why would some of us still sacrifice and risk ourselves anyways? Well maybe because there’s more to life than simply staying alive.
Now that doesn’t make any sense at all. Why are we here if not to survive and reproduce? You’re right to think that because this self sacrificing love I’m describing is completely nonsensical. However it’s still as true to us as our every instinct to preserve ourselves. So innate to humankind that we have the ability to find this love even while there is none of it to be found. We can create it. It is in this way that God if he were such a thing, is even more present in all of us than any amount of misdeed his world has wrought. Now I’m not saying to go out and do dangerous or reckless things in the name of love.
What I’m ultimately saying is this. The next time you want to do something better. Don’t let logic tell you otherwise because love’s inspiration never had to be rational. It simply had to be, and so it was, the very moment you decided there’s more than you know.
Physically, we bleed not because we’ve been wounded, but because we were safe before the injury. Emotionally, we were safe before that injury not because we stuck with the path most traveled or remained sheltered in our home, but because we took a chance outside of these things. Everything you love only comes from everything you’ve lost. Not the other way around.
So please. Don’t be afraid to suffer for what you believe in. This love is the power we possess as humans that endures no matter what we go through, and remains, as long as we choose to risk that better thing we’ve been wanting to do, even against all reason. I’m not here to survive. I’m here for something much more than that. I hope you are too.
You’re not alone in this. Actually, there’s a religious saying that you don’t have to be religious to understand. It goes, “The Devil will come for you when you’re at your highest point.” For many of us, that highest moment is when we truly wanted to do something better, but then there’s a voice in your head that is somehow able to say exactly what you want to hear. It has the most convincing and persuasive arguments ever for why you just can’t or shouldn’t. Before you know what’s happening, you’re talked right out of it and you forgo the scary unknown for the comfortable familiar. The moment you do that voice suddenly stops and leaves you alone, right up until you try to make something of yourself again.
Now once more, you don’t have to believe in something like Satan to understand what I’m talking about. If you prefer you could call it self-doubt. Anxiety. Trauma. This self preservation from fear is something meant to keep us exactly where we are and when that’s a bad place, you can bet a force like Satan would want to keep you there forever. Now if you don’t believe in fantastical concepts like good and evil, then why else would we self sabotage ourselves like this? Well, it’s to protect ourselves.
You see when life threatens us, or worse, when it harms us, we reach new lows and our highs become any effort we make to get out of that pit. This desire to change is love, but why would someone have love in a world that has left them hopelessly damaged? That has victimized them? Well that’s certainly the kind of logic a being like Satan would want you to have or if you prefer, simple survival. Makes perfect sense. You did something and received a painful lesson. So why act on that again? It would be senseless. You’ve heard that voice. The one telling you why you shouldn’t or can’t do that thing. So then why would some of us still sacrifice and risk ourselves anyways? Well maybe because there’s more to life than simply staying alive.
Now that doesn’t make any sense at all. Why are we here if not to survive and reproduce? You’re right to think that because this self sacrificing love I’m describing is completely nonsensical. However it’s still as true to us as our every instinct to preserve ourselves. So innate to humankind that we have the ability to find this love even while there is none of it to be found. We can create it. It is in this way that God if he were such a thing, is even more present in all of us than any amount of misdeed his world has wrought. Now I’m not saying to go out and do dangerous or reckless things in the name of love.
What I’m ultimately saying is this. The next time you want to do something better. Don’t let logic tell you otherwise because love’s inspiration never had to be rational. It simply had to be, and so it was, the very moment you decided there’s more than you know.
Physically, we bleed not because we’ve been wounded, but because we were safe before the injury. Emotionally, we were safe before that injury not because we stuck with the path most traveled or remained sheltered in our home, but because we took a chance outside of these things. Everything you love only comes from everything you’ve lost. Not the other way around.
So please. Don’t be afraid to suffer for what you believe in. This love is the power we possess as humans that endures no matter what we go through, and remains, as long as we choose to risk that better thing we’ve been wanting to do, even against all reason. I’m not here to survive. I’m here for something much more than that. I hope you are too.
