Grow or Die

Excerpt from Making The Courage Connection

In life, you're either nurturing courage and experiencing new wonders or you're merely letting your life elapse. It's a matter of grow or die.

As long as you're growing, you're free. If you choose to subordinate your life to something you don't believe in because it's less of a strain or it's lucrative or it's what others expect of you, you'll lose yourself. Slowly but surely, a piece of you will fade away each day.

When you grow, you gain strength. Imagine an acorn falling to the forest floor. It sprouts, develops into a seedling and begins pushing toward the sky, growing taller and stronger, sprouting new shoots and leaves with each passing year. The taller the tree grows, the more resistant it becomes to disease, the better it's able to handle droughts. Its limbs continue to reach upward until the day it dies. If you live a growth-oriented life, then you, too, will find the strength necessary to overcome the inevitable adversities that go along with having a pulse.

The natural order of a tree is continuous growth. It cannot suspend its own growth. Each season, it must add another ring to its girth, sprout new buds, push its roots deeper into the earth. People are like trees in that we have the ability to vegetate. People are unlike trees in that we can also cogitate. Cogitating has its good points and its bad points. It gives us the ability to control our orientation; that is, the ways and directions in which we grow. But it also gives us the capacity, however unconsciously, to imagine that we can suspend our growth, plant ourselves right where we are and maintain a seated position from here on in, preferably on a comfy couch. This often occurs during some stage of adulthood.

When we're children, we embrace growth. We eagerly learn to walk, to talk and to let our needs be known. When we turn six, we can't wait to be eight. When we're eight, we can't wait to be 10. But as we progress from wanting to be older to wishing we were young again, we think we can stop changing, stop growing and stay right where we are. But when we voluntarily stop growing, we pay a terrible price. We trade growth for death.

When we give up on growing, we become slaves to conformity and mediocrity. We exchange an aggressive love of life for a life lived on the defensive. When we consign ourselves to slavery, we apply courage to protecting what we are and what we have instead of using it as a tool for growth. We spend our courage fighting fears instead of stimulating growth. But as long as you're growing, you're free.

Freedom is an abstract concept. Like the wind, you can't see it or touch it. But you know it's there because you can feel it. You can feel its presence, and you can feel its absence. Freedom makes it possible to go one-on-one with the world. It makes it possible for one person to make a difference - just as believing it's possible makes it possible. When you're free, you elevate yourself from being a faceless member in a faceless society to an individual with a dream.

Once upon a time in America, the importance of freedom was drummed into our heads. The willingness to die for freedom was programmed into the hearts of America's school children. Little boys wanted to grow up to be John Wayne, with the inner strength to pay the ultimate price on some desolate foreign shore so their families would never have to worry about being free.

Somewhere along the line, all that changed. Once we began taking freedom for granted, it became less precious. Instead of remaining eternally vigilant, America became a nation of eternal compromisers. In the process, we traded freedom for convenience. We sold ourselves into slavery, in all its many forms - slavery to our fears; slavery to established thinking, whether it's right or wrong; slavery to always taking the path of least resistance; slavery to preconceived notions of who we are and what we are. For too many of us, it has become acceptable to give up without a fight.

Today, America is in an era of voluntary slavery. We've learned to curl up and blame our problems on external circumstances. The tragedy is that no one forced us at bayonet point to give up our dreams and ideals; the tragedy is that we've surrendered them. Individually and collectively, we've relinquished the power to determine how we think to whatever winds happen to be blowing through the culture at the moment. As our values become blurred, our lives spin out of control.

It takes courage to break the bonds, step forward and take a chance on a dream you've been trying to ignore. But the consequences of remaining in a state of voluntary slavery and doing nothing should terrify you. My friends, it's a short step from taking your freedom for granted to taking your life for granted. It's another short step to looking back on your life and realizing you, let your life, slip through your fingers.

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Think about your dream. And realize it can't begin to happen until you find the courage to take the first step, even if it's only a small step. Stop saving yourself for tomorrow. Start living now.

You have the ability to control your life. You have the heart, the courage and the brains to enrich your life journey. So what are you waiting for? You are where you are. Start from there. Start now.

Your dream will come true only if you have the courage to be true to yourself. Cling to the words of Ben Franklin:

"Up sluggard and waste not life, in the grave will be sleeping enough."

Take heart. Be brave. And may God bless you.