Courage, Wisdom Or Both?

When we are born, our life starts to follow a path. While on that path there are things that depend on us and others that don’t. We have the power upon ourselves to change the things we can depending what we want. The other things, the ones that don’t depend on us we can’t change “You are foolish if you want your children and your wife and your friends to live forever.”(Section 14). Circumstances like the one just mentioned are things we have to accept, especially this one because death is the one thing we know for sure will happen.

Every man wants to achieve success, in order to do so we must stop focusing in the things we can’t change and give more importance to those we can. By doing so we learn to identify our strengths and weaknesses, learn from our mistakes, and set a goal we want to achieve. This thought rarely passes through our minds because most of us think of ourselves as flawless human beings, think we don’t make mistakes but other people make them and they simply affect us. So we don’t know what we need to change from ourselves in order to succeed. The first step we need to take for our goal to be achieved is accept we do have weaknesses, look past our pride, accept that the mistakes we have made in the past, have been because of us and no one else. Then look for possible ways not to make that mistakes again or correct it if the opportunity is still available. By doing so, we will grow as people and obtain greater success in our emotional and physical aspects.

All of this varies depending on the personality of the individual. For some people it is easy to accept their mistakes, others have so much pride that they think they are perfect are and what goes wrong is never because of them but always because of something else. These people never ask for forgiveness because we have the mentally that it was not our fault. In the end it’s harder for them because they are one step behind the others, and in order to accept their mistakes, they first of all, must learn that they do make them.

There are three situations in life: the ones you can’t change, the one you can and the ones that are not up to you. Reading section 14 made me recall this prayer I often hear: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” (SH 209). Even if it’s hard we must remember to live according to that prayer, and identify the things we can and can’t change and to know that neither too much courage nor too much wisdom is the best way to look at situations in life but instead a mixture of both.