Bob Moawad said that the best day of our lives, the day our lives really begin, is the one on which we realize that our lives are our own. No apologies, no excuses, no one to lean on, rely on, or to blame. An amazing journey to freedom can unfold right then and we alone are responsible for traversing it.
On MY best day, I experienced great pain because I finally understood the gifts I had been wasting. I realized, however, that it was not too late to make a change. The pain was cleansing and I had to embrace it if I intended to become a better person. The pain subsided when I quit worrying about what I should have done, made a plan and moved forward.
A dream or even a plan for betterment is worthless if not brought to fruition. Moreover, we cannot encourage others with the necessary thinking, planning, execution and perseverance if we do not, ourselves, understand and follow the principles of our own professed mission. The greatest acts of love and respect we can show for ourselves, as well as for anybody we care about or who cares about us, is to save our own lives — physical lives – living free; but also our spiritual lives. If we maximize our own level of achievement and success, we can invite others to join us on our loft.
God had given me an enormous physical capacity for hard work, pain-tolerance, little need for sleep, and, finally at 18, that sudden awareness that the capacities were inside me at birth. For those gifts — capacities and awareness — I have expressed gratitude to my Maker; after that, my gratitude has been shown by what I have done with what the gifts. If I had not taken full control of myself and my plan, expressions of gratitude to God would have been a useless exercise and I would have remained where I was, insulting God, my family, my community and myself.
At times, saving one’s life, maximizing personal achievement and success, may appear to be selfish; but, it is extremely more difficult, perhaps impossible, to assist other people out of a ditch if one is in his or her own ditch and is digging one’s self deeper into that ditch by mediocrity in achievement.
We must get free spiritually to help “enslaved” youngsters understand the difference between physical abuses, against their bodies, and symbolic ones, against their minds — words, flags, and gestures — so they can build the level of psychological power that will equip them to withstand metaphorical assaults thrown at them and continue to drive toward building successful lives. If not, they will continue to “self-enslave.”
Character development or spiritual strengthening is the surest means, the only means, of countering arbitrary and superficial in-group/out-group designations that place some entities above others and give rise to racism, sexism, and other negative biases. Each individual must build power in the human spirit; if not, the forces which produced inequities in times past will continue to retard progress, regeneration and success.
No matter what we do to try to convince youth of their inherent personal potential, power and value, until they gain the personal strength to assert themselves for themselves, there is no way they can know what they can be; and until they know what they can be, they will never know what and who they should be. If they do not understand and accept what and who they should and can be, they will never become self-defining, self-controlling human beings, able to withstand the onslaughts from their environment.
Development of personal power is difficult, but not impossible even for descendants of slaves. The irreplaceable traits so necessary for young people to develop themselves into the kinds of citizens who can advance themselves, their families, their communities, their people and their nation cannot be taught to them in the formal sense we normally ascribe to the teaching-learning process. Although we must continue to teach, even preach, the “theory,” we must know that it is not what they are taught that counts, but what they understand, inculcate and employ in their behavior.
The irreplaceable success traits of which I speak – Self-control, Self-esteem, Dignity, Pride, Confidence, Self-assurance, Courage, Honor, and Self-Respect – are caught by youngsters the way they catch viruses — in this case, Beneficial Viruses — and are caught from the people who are present and influential in their lives.
These success traits in personal power are obituary traits; traits that foster behavior you want people who love you and whom you love to know about you and remember after you have left this earthly plane. Similar to what Zora Neale Hurston said about pride: If you don’t have personal power, you can’t show it; if you have personal power, you can’t hide it. I add, if you don’t gain it and hold it, you will be destroyed in this American Democracy, no matter who your ancestors were.
