Animals are my teachers. When I watch them doing their thing, I
learn tons of lessons that help me make my life into what I want it to be.
Take dragon flies for instance.
Dragon flies are like humans. In their short lives
they spend their time doing two major things: flying and holding on.
Most of the time dragon flies are flying flapping their wings a
bazillion times a second as they zip from place to place.
Occasionally, I see them with their landing gear down holding on.
I do the same things, except that most of the time I am holding on, and
only occasionally I spread my wings and fly. Sometimes I even forget
that I have wings.
Every morning God drops a new day in my lap and gives me
the opportunity to fly. The trouble is that too much of
the time I am holding on when I should be flying. Even after sailing
around the world on a yacht, even after navigating through pirate infested
waters, even after surviving the savage seas, my inner voice tells me to
hold on and do the safe thing when it should be encouraging me to fly. I'm beginning to wonder whether my inner voice has a problem.
Holding on has two major problems.
First, holding on keeps me where I am, stuck in a no
growth zone. Life is about growth and change, and if I'm not growing
and changing, then I'm wasting my life. I'm dying before my time and
life is too short for that. It's a big world out there with hundreds
of countries to visit and thousands of opportunities for adventure.
I'm going to tell you a secret. The reason God gave me a new day is
so I could do something new with it. I'm not supposed to do the same
things today that I did yesterday. That would be going into rewind and
making my life into a rerun. What a waste! Every day is a new
life. Yesterday was my old life, and today is my
new life. If I live right today, I will make it into something
entirely new. I will break new ground and become a new person
different from the one I was yesterday.
The second problem with holding on is that I usually hold on to the wrong
things; I hold on to stuff. Just look at my yacht. It's now
floating about twelve inches below its designed water line because of all
the stuff I have on board. And then there is all the stuff I have in
storage facilities waiting for the day that someone finally disposes of
it in an estate sale. I'm not the only one afflicted with this curious
addiction to stuff. Just drive down the streets of America, and you
will see people cramming their stuff into storage facilities everywhere.
There's only one thing that I should hold on to, and that is love. Stuff comes and
goes, but love endures forever. I've owned a lot of things in my life,
and I've rediscovered that the best things in life still are free.
I'll tell you what I want: good health, a heart full of love, and enough
freedom chips to keep on trucking. If I have those three things, I have everything I need to fly.
Thank you Mister Dragon Fly. Thanks for reminding me to let go and
to spread my wings and fly.
