Emerson’s Self-Reliance: Words to Live By

I dip into random readings as you can tell. In the book “Raiders” I came across a passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self Reliance. I had to read it several times. Maybe it just really made me think.

“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word…..Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood?’....Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?...To be great is to be misunderstood.”

I think this is what growing up is about. Consistency is important but if the data changes, if your environment changes, if the world changes, it might make sense to re-evaluate your beliefs. 

I think back to how unreligious or even anti-religious I was growing up in Canada and through most of my 20-40’s in America. “Opium for the Masses” as it was called. But I was wrong. It’s a powerful and long standing & ancient belief system that helps people. A code of conduct for living well with others. Like many things, it took plenty of hardship and suffering to learn.

Consistency is important but so is change. Change is hard. It takes courage to make big changes in your life. So take action. Make the big changes required in your life to make things better.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance: “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”