Failure is not the worst thing that could happen to a man. Your refusal to get up is worse than the misfortune of falling. All men fall and have fallen at some point in life. While some made their beds on the grounds they have stumbled, others made bricks from the earth upon which they had fallen and built mansions for themselves.
It is difficult to convince a man who has lost hope to believe, it is nonetheless the best thing you can offer him. There is a natural tendency in man to want to preserve himself before anything else, and so we chose the path that is easiest to trod. And this applies to every one of us. Knowing that we are all susceptible to failure, condemning those who have failed will not be the wisest thing to do even if you have not experienced it.
However, we cannot also celebrate those who have given up on trying just because we are fallible as everyone else. So, while it is good for others to extend hands of help when you are down in the gutters of life, the onus lie on you the most to lift yourself up and out.
The idea that people must help you as if they owe you does not and will not help you in any way. It is your life we are talking about here. The decision to live or not is yours to make. More over you are the person living the life. If you succeed or fail at it, you will ultimately reap the benefits either way it turns. It was Soichiro Honda (the founder of Honda Automobiles) who said; if you believe you can or cannot, you are right. Think about it.
Do not get me wrong, we all need a little help from time to time. I have always said; no one is self made. The richest man in the world was helped. Notwithstanding, do not go about demanding that people help you. It is the prerogative of the helper to offer help or not. So do not live your life expecting that any one is under some obligation to help you. As a matter of fact, living without such expectations is less burdensome. You suffer from less anxiety and tendency to hate or to be bitter.
And if you are in a position to help, please do. We live in a time when people are fast losing faith in humanity. This is largely because of their experiences in the hands of other humans, especially people they have trusted at some point in life. My people would say; the reason a poor man builds his house close to the rich man' is so that the light from the rich man's compound can shine onto his. That is not the case today, because the rich man's fence is so high it blocks out the light.
The increasing insecurity, heightened corruption, hatred, widening gap between social class etc can be traced to; man's inhumanity to man. It's appalling to even imagine that a man would consider himself better or higher than another simply on the basis of tribe, race or nation. These are not strange occurrences in our present world, we live with and experience it everyday. If we need to change the cataclysmic direction we are headed, we need to calibrate our hearts.
We will need to learn to stretch out our hands and hearts, to ask and to give. Do not hate those who does not help and do not refuse to help if you can do so.
I wish you a wonderful July. Have a great day and month. It's past 1am already, yet I can't get sleep. I am resuming morning duty today and I need to get some rest before heading to work in about five hours.
The good Lord continue to watch over all of us. Remember, help those who need your help if you can.
