The prospect of a future marked with success is great fuel for today's journey. So whether you lie down at night and imagine yourself speaking to thousands of people and basking in their admiration, or you put up pictures of yachts and mansions in front of your reading table, you are in good company. But the daily steps required to arrive at such a destination, are often not easy to take.
If we do succeed, the people who tell our stories, including us, will likely romanticize our success, and add a glaze of beauty to the struggles we had to endure to emerge victorious. Such stories of near failure and defeat that culminate in victory are so irresistibly sweet- the stuff of children's stories, but the hearers will never understand that while living it out, there was nothing beautiful about those struggles- they were real.
Moments of inadequacy and self-doubt are hardly ever missing from a hero story. Even Jesus who knew the purpose and ultimate end of His life, at that dreadful moment of darkness in Gethsemane had a tough period that perhaps more than any other, revealed his humanness. We humans get afraid during tough journeys and begin to fantasize about giving up. I know I've had too many of such moments. This is perhaps the reason the nonsensical saying that "school is a scam" has become so popular.
In reality, no one, no matter how driven or clear-minded they are about their life's aim, is spared from the trepidation of living it out today. And maybe it is not such a bad thing that we are not burdened with the knowledge of tomorrow, for whether good or bad, it can scarcely help us today.
The truest act of bravery is therefore the courage to live through today as best we can, knowing that "by the mile it's hard, but inch by inch everything is a cinch".
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