Month: December 2018

It is more worthy to leap

I can’t say it better than Shakespeare:

“It is more worthy to leap than to delay until you are pushed.”

Although this epithet was in the context of a hopeless ultimate battle, I find it very appropriate to my mild 20th century personal situation.

Previously, I have felt hurt and I have been in distress and malaise. I wouldn’t call it suffering out of respect for those who actually suffer, the living people who I see and read about every day. But all of it – all of this drawn-out unease, has been self-imposed, or at least exacerbated by circumstances that were self-imposed.

So I leapt.

I leapt and found a string of opportunities to exercise several faculties I treasure: curiosity, adaptiveness, initiative and adventurousness. These are faculties or skills that I treasure but have occasionally allowed to lie dormant or underutilized.

But I stopped delaying. I took out one of the sharp instruments I had honed and I cut the essential from the nonessential. I looked to the many hazy opportunities before me and selected them above the few known opportunities that were behind me.

Tomorrow I continue and I am confident my enterprises will thrive. Once again I cannot say it better: “Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

I don’t plan to die like Brutus did in a wild, dire conspiracy. I have a long and happy life ahead of me. What I mean is that I will no longer accept becoming an “underling” due to my own choices or due to my own failure to choose.