right beneath your feet
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“The path is always right beneath your feet.”
Issan Dorsey Roshi
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Ok. This is a quasi-rant on hope.
We often speak of hope in big sweeping terms. We talk about scanning wide open aspirational horizons for something better. Yet. The boring truth is that more often than not the reality of hope resides right under your feet on a path you currently stand, walk, ride or run.
Yeah. Not exciting to think about. But your choices, decisions and where you elect to place one foot after another is where hope resides.
It’s not found within a thankless society, a selfish culture nor an ever increasingly appearing unstable world … it is within us.
That’s why whenever I hear anyone say “the American dream is dead” I want to say “fuck you.”
And I want to say that not just for some esoteric American dream, but rather for anyone’s dreams & hopes in any country.
Huh?
I just want anyone & everyone to stop fucking with my dreams and my hopes.
Now.
I won’t argue that the world today is challenging enough to make it feel more despair than hope, more bad than good, and that the system makes it more difficult for individuals to attain some of their hopes & dreams, but that is external stimulus; not internal resolve. And I, frankly, don’t want to give my dreams and hopes to some external cloud storage system for care … I want to store them in me.
They are mine to protect and project.
Which leads me to destiny, fate and hope.
Well.
What I am suggesting this means is that I believe we make our own destinies. Every day we are presented with choices. Some we don’t even recognize. Some we don’t even see <until they are past>. Some we see and make a choice. Our destiny is a reflection of these choices — made and not made.
Our hopes and dreams are made right there.
This does not mean our independence is not interconnected in an interdependent fashion in some ways … just that in order to cut through the spiderweb of random things you may be dependent upon you have to independently make choices and decisions.
If you do not?
Well. That makes your own hope also dependent upon this spiderweb of … uhm … shit in the proverbial shithole around us. And who the hell wants that?
This all means that I believe we assume, and have, responsibility — as in responsibility for your own actions <and hence your dreams, fate, destiny & hope>.
Not everyone will embrace that thought.
Today it seems more likely someone will suggest their behavior, mistakes, flaws and even their dashed dreams & hopes are a reflection of outside influences, a ‘lesser than’ home life experience growing up, poverty, ethnicity, or some painful experience that impacted us in childhood.
Some people that is what they learned.
And some people were taught otherwise by their adult mentors. Some learn that when you screw up it is on ‘you’ and no one else.
Some learn you can be frequently wrong, frequently stupid, but if you have been taught to be accountable and to admit to your accountability, you may get some shit from people but you will also be known as someone who is accountable for their own actions. And you will also have assumed accountability, and responsibility, for your own hope & dreams.
I am in the latter group. I assume accountability & responsibility for my hopes & dreams.
So … please, PLEASE, don’t try and tell me my dream has been killed.
You are fucking with my hope.
And you are fucking with people’s minds.
To be clear. Someone trying to fuck with our minds matters. It matters because, well, Susan Neiman, a social philosopher, said it maybe the best:
“As long as your ideas of what’s possible are limited by what’s actual, no other idea has a chance.”
Someone may suggest a dream is owned by a country or a business, but they are wrong.
Someone may suggest hope is in the purview of some mystical leader who can deliver it in some way upon us, but they are wrong.
Someone may suggest both my dreams and hopes are at the mercy of some system or obstructed by some evil activity in my past, but they are wrong.
They are wrong because the moment you actually agree you have permitted your ideas of what is possible to be limited by what appears as actual <and let me tell ya … ‘actual’ is a moving target in and of itself’> … and no other idea … no dream … no hope … has a chance.
My hope is my hope.
My dreams are my dreams.
Quit fucking with my hope.
Quit fucking with my dreams.
They are mine.
And the path to them is right underneath my feet.
The only thing stopping me from taking one step closer toward my hopes & dreams is me.
The only thing getting me closer toward my hopes & dreams is me taking one step forward on the pat … that path right beneath my feet.
Hope is mine. And keep your grubby hands off it.
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