Discovering Encouragement

 

It has been said the only certainties in life are death and taxes; everything changes. Given that fact, understanding how to recognize and take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves is vital to setting and achieving your goals, no matter how insurmountable they seem. You can change your life, just like the man in the following anecdote, with dedication and time. “There was a time in my life when I wanted to die. I was hopeless; I believed that my life was meaningless and I was destined to fail myself and the people I loved. A debilitating learning disability coupled with serious vision problems lead to me barely be able to read or write. Reading full books was such a struggle that I gave up on them when I was ten and without that ability, I felt as though I'd never amount to anything more than a fast food worker drudging life away on minimum wage. It was incredibly disheartening and I was filled with the fear that I would be a burden and a disgrace to my family. The effort of reading or putting pen to paper felt impossible, within minutes my eyes would start to stress and the strain of trying to focus would cause them to unconsciously shut down. It was exhausting and only got worse the older I got; by the time I was in my teens my vision was limited to a tunnel. An eye exam in my 20's revealed that the muscles that supported the movement of my eyes were so hampered that any attempt to do close work sapped them as much as if I'd run a 5k. It was clear that if I was going to receive information in our visually oriented world, I would have to adapt and retrain the way my brain processed visual data or fall through the cracks. The doctors gave me eye exercises and I did them faithfully; working to strengthen the coordination of my ocular muscles and my ability to relax them when necessary. After a year of consistent rehabilitation my hard work finally began to pay off and I was able to start putting pen to paper and reading for short bursts of time. It was a revelation; especially when I learned that seventeen percent of people are unable to read or write. I was determined that would never be me again; so I resolved to build upon the improvement I achieved and use it to write a book of my own that I would self publish by the time I was 30. It's been a challenging road full of the small setbacks that life throws at people but I've accomplished my goal and I can now say that my book, the culmination all of those years of overcoming, is complete. It's titled “A Tribute to Friendship We are One of Many”. It was a long journey but I reached my destination one step at a time by committing to just one hour a day of both writing and reading. One hour sounds so insignificant but over the course of a decade those hours added up to a full year's worth of time. That's like changing your entire life by one degree's worth of discipline.” So we can learn from this man's incredible story that it's possible, no matter how difficult the problem, to change your life for the better using only enough discipline to make one small change. This is not a trend or a promise of a miracle cure but a long standing theory about the world around us first popularized as chaos theory by French philosopher Henri Poincare. Henri postulated that even actions as small at the beating of a butterfly’s wings can have an effect through time and space, causing an infinitesimal chain reaction that gains momentum as it travels like ripples in a still pond. That's why chaos theory is also commonly known at the butterfly effect. Our lives are not fixed points in the space time continuum from the moment we're born, but unpredictable paths that are the sum of even the smallest choices we make. Our protagonist could have resigned himself to the life others predicted for him and taken that menial job. He could have accepted that it was his fate and never tried to push beyond the limits imposed on him by life and the world but he didn't. He stood up and made a choice to try for something better, no matter how little he was able to dedicate to it when he began and that dedication to one small change made more possible than he'd dared to dream. The lesson here is clear; the small steps you set in motion today begin a series of events that will determine your future. It's never too late to change your fate; as long as you are living the changes you make today WILL affect your tomorrows. You can keep doing the same thing or you can choose a different course by listening free for more about how to stay your course and conquer mammoth goals, plus read a sample of the e-book “A Tribute to Friendship We are One of Many.”