Good morning all, Cid here with your
Motivational Monday!
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
Henry David Thoreau
Hammer and Forge
Today is the start of a big change around the house, and I’m sure Kisa will have lots to say about that when she has the time! I know I’m pretty nervous and excited about it.
Today’s quote is about character building – something that a lot of people hear about all the time, but very few really think about. “It builds character,” something I’ve heard from a lot of older people about a lot of unpleasant things, like going through school, going to dead-end jobs, using a manual push lawnmower (the kind without any motor at all!), digging and planting a garden with just a shovel, and lots more.
‘Character’ in this sense is about being your own person, an individual, with your own thoughts and feelings. This quote says something very important about it: you can think about it, or dream about it, all you want, but until you take action, you’re not going to get it. Forging is an especially good analogy, because that means it needs to go through some heat, have the impurities and roughness pounded out of it, be cleaned off in cold water, and go through that whole process a few times before it can be called finished.
Some people are naturally just nice and pleasant, but they’re also usually pretty innocent, and often break down when they’re really put under pressure. The best of them find ways to make themselves better people out of the hardships. We all go through hard times, it’s just up to us to make sure those hard times turn us into better people, forge better characters out of us, instead of breaking us or turning us into mangled heaps of waste.
Until next week,
-C
Image courtesy of www.morguefile.com
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