Brentjp99 (completed)
Finding limits
How do we find our limits?
Some are driven to them, like soldiers in a battlefield, to die pathetically in a muddy hole, or fight and survive gloriously.
Some find it within themselves to push beyond what they believed was possible. To transcend even their own perceptions of boundary and will. They may be surprised, or just relieved; elated, or stunned.
For some, the push is from without. Driven by uncontrollable forces to delve within themselves for that which will let them surmount preconceptions of where their own envelope lies. Sometimes a choice is made: I must do this or perish. Sometimes their salvation occurs as a thing to be considered in retrospect - almost as a flash of chance - to astound them in its subsequent success (how did I do that?).
We may go through our lives happy or struggling, gripped by conflict or blissfully confident in our organised, smooth path. We may coast obliviously, with reckless abandon, grinning like ignorant fools. We may be forced to make cold, hard decisions, or have our lives comfortably mapped in a bland and safe conformity of existence.
Bravery is no guarantee; in a world where an idiot may cross a busy street, eyes shut, without injury, a pure heart may be brushed from existence like a mangled insect from the windshield of the world by life's uncaring wiper blades. Fools may prospur where good men fall.
Our limits come to us, or we to them. We may walk safe, or bleed. Some call it fate; some call it passion. There are those who call it luck.
Western philosophy hails victors: those who surmount the odds. Oriental thought lauds the concept of struggle, 'though it lead to failure; the path that was taken, despite the result; the heart within the fight. Thus the most noteworthy of men may be swept to oblivion, unkown, unhailed, but supremely noble purely by virtue of their tense and grappling dual with circumstance.
I know not how we find our limits. I know that if we do, it is our soul that decides what, facing them, we must do.
Finding limits
How do we find our limits?
Some are driven to them, like soldiers in a battlefield, to die pathetically in a muddy hole, or fight and survive gloriously.
Some find it within themselves to push beyond what they believed was possible. To transcend even their own perceptions of boundary and will. They may be surprised, or just relieved; elated, or stunned.
For some, the push is from without. Driven by uncontrollable forces to delve within themselves for that which will let them surmount preconceptions of where their own envelope lies. Sometimes a choice is made: I must do this or perish. Sometimes their salvation occurs as a thing to be considered in retrospect - almost as a flash of chance - to astound them in its subsequent success (how did I do that?).
We may go through our lives happy or struggling, gripped by conflict or blissfully confident in our organised, smooth path. We may coast obliviously, with reckless abandon, grinning like ignorant fools. We may be forced to make cold, hard decisions, or have our lives comfortably mapped in a bland and safe conformity of existence.
Bravery is no guarantee; in a world where an idiot may cross a busy street, eyes shut, without injury, a pure heart may be brushed from existence like a mangled insect from the windshield of the world by life's uncaring wiper blades. Fools may prospur where good men fall.
Our limits come to us, or we to them. We may walk safe, or bleed. Some call it fate; some call it passion. There are those who call it luck.
Western philosophy hails victors: those who surmount the odds. Oriental thought lauds the concept of struggle, 'though it lead to failure; the path that was taken, despite the result; the heart within the fight. Thus the most noteworthy of men may be swept to oblivion, unkown, unhailed, but supremely noble purely by virtue of their tense and grappling dual with circumstance.
I know not how we find our limits. I know that if we do, it is our soul that decides what, facing them, we must do.