No Plan B

There have been some people, actual close friends of mine, that I've questioned not just their commitment to do 'the work' but their ability, their very basic inner strength, I can't even call it 'character' because it's not that, it's simply a strength they have at the core of who they are to take themselves on and look at the hardest things about themselves. To look at where you have been hoisted by your own petard, for it's one thing to see the unconscionable grievous acts committed by one's one mother or father. Yes, those leave a searing wound in the soul of a young child. But the hardest things about us take on another dimension when we know we've inflicted them on ourselves even if the 'why' of that infliction is not our fault. THAT is where the real fiber of a soul lies, deep in that steely place where to actually look can cause one to either turn away from a fear too paralyzing to consider for even a millisecond, or...maybe we can stand the racing heartbeat and the momentary vile the seeps through our own veins and the horrible consideration that maybe, just maybe, we have made our own hell. It's those who can look, who can be with the thought that maybe they are their own devil and have created their own hell regardless of who led us to the gate, that we walked through that gate and we stand there now in the middle of a world we did not intend and do not want but we created it. It's only those characters I'm interested in, only those heroic and steely yet wobbly souls who have the gift of seeing the darkness and pondering their own, because it's those people who want the best and can truly carry love and vision and light into the only real world that exists - the one they create. Those are the heros of the world regardless if they are a janitor or a physicist or a mother or a doctor or an ex-con. THAT is humanity, to acknowledge what is human in all it's ugliness and to transform it into something beautiful, and to come out of it and be able to love. That is a hero.

If one has to travel that path to become truly whole there is no plan B. When there is only one road to take the hero forges ahead, the others try a more comfortable path.