Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Rocking the Boat

    Do you ever have those moments when you're idly browsing a social network or scouring the web for something and come across a gem that you really needed, but didn't know you didn't know you needed it until then? I just had such a moment. All it took was seeing a link to a blog post on Facebook and boom! I had a figurative slap to the face with a large, blunt object.
    This one, simple quote was the main reason-- "In short, we cannot grow, we cannot achieve authentic discovery, and our eyes cannot be cleansed to the truly beautiful possibilities of life, if we simply live a neutral existence." Wow. How often do we settle for not “rocking the boat?” How often do we stand by and watch life pass us by, simply because we're comfortable (or at the very least not totally uncomfortable) where we're at? How often do we close our eyes or our ears so that we don't have to acknowledge something because it's too hard, too painful, too inconvenient? I'm not saying that being neutral is totally bad—it's not—but too often we use it for an excuse, a reason to not do more or be more than we could. Sometimes, we use it to hold back.
    Life is a choice and everything in life is hinged upon the decisions that we make. It's what helps us to grow and to learn. So if we're totally neutral all the time, do we grow and learn? My guess is no. We might grow some and learn a few things, but nowhere near as much as we could have. It makes us like a stagnate pond with very little influx of new stuff and no outlet for everything else.