The Opposite Of Courage In Our Society Is Not Cowardice- It Is Conformity
This is my serious attempt to clean out my email box from my hospital stay. My emails have a lot of great knowledge from people. I’ve been holding out on all the information in my email. I want to keep the knowledge and clean my inbox. So I came up with the idea to write a blog post on these emails. Done and done. I won’t forget to delete either. Note, this is two emails combined in one.
Falcons and the branch
Once there was a king who received a gift of two magnificent falcons from Arabia. They were peregrine falcons, the most beautiful birds he had ever seen. He gave the precious birds to his head falconer to be trained.
Months passed and one day the head falconer informed the king that though one of the falcons was flying majestically, soaring high in the sky, the other bird had not moved from its branch since the day it had arrived.
The king summoned healers and sorcerers from all the land to tend to the falcon, but no one could make the bird fly. He presented the task to the member of his court, but the next day, the king saw through the palace window that the bird had still not moved from its perch. Having tried everything else, the king thought to himself, “May be I need someone more familiar with the countryside to understand the nature of this problem.” So he cried out to his court, “Go and get a farmer.”
In the morning, the king was thrilled to see the falcon soaring high above the palace gardens. He said to his court, “Bring me the doer of this miracle.”
The court quickly located the farmer, who came and stood before the king. The king asked him, “How did you make the falcon fly?”
With head bowed, the farmer said to the king, “ It was very easy, your highness. I simply cut the branch of the tree where the bird was sitting.”
Takeaways From This Story:
We are all made to fly — to realize our incredible potential as human beings. But instead of doing that, we sit on our branches, clinging to the things that are familiar to us. The possibilities are endless, but for most of us, they remain undiscovered. We conform to the familiar, the comfortable, the mundane. So for the most part, our lives are mediocre instead of exciting, thrilling and fulfilling. So let us learn to destroy the branch of fear we cling to and free ourselves to the glory of flight..
We were brought up being taught to be “rational” or “sensible”. When making decisions, to face facts…And to “think things through”. To conform to society’s norms about how people “should” make decisions. And we do. We succumb to this social pressure all the time. And the worst part is, we do this habitually — because this is how we were raised.
You are right here, right now for a reason. You are reading this post this very sentence at this very moment because this exactly where you need to be right now. And this is what you need to hear…The way you’ve been making decisions all your life is just one way. You are here to learn that there’s also a different way. A way that might serve you better.
So that you will end up making decisions that won’t come back to bite you in the behind. Decisions that serve YOU, and HELP you follow your path.
You’re at an important point in your life. You can make a decision that might literally change the course existence.
Listen to your inner voice (not your fearful ego!) and trust your vibes.
I felt like all my life, everyone had an expectation for me and others around me. I went to a racist private Catholic grade school and I caught it from both sides. The black students really didn’t like me, (light skin dark skin battles happened all the time to the point where kids tried to fight me haha). I had someone who call themselves being my “best friend” but she stabbed me in the back. She would spread rumors to other students in the class, and didn’t think I knew about it. And she would take the information I told her, and make the other kids think she knew it first. If you only told one person something, then other kids in the class know about it a few days later, don’t you think you would catch on to who’s snitching on you? It was a test to see if she was trustworthy or not. To this day, she still tries to be my friend every time I see her, but I can’t trust someone like that.
I wasn’t ghetto and never conformed to being ghetto to fit in. Not only did the kids spread gossip and were jealous of my long hair, the teachers didn’t like it that they couldn’t put me in a box. During basketball season, the principle and several teachers looked for dirt on the coach. At the time, we were 8 and 0. Because we were doing well, they wanted to destroy every great thing we could ever do. And that they did. Distractions and internal issues off the court caused some players to quit. The teachers even looked to see if anyone had bad grades to see if they could disqualify them. Why anyone want to massacre their own team I have no clue. The teachers tried to get back at me by making mistakes on my report card. My 8th grade English teacher marked C in there instead of my A. The teachers made so many mistakes on my report card that my mom went to the principle. Of course, the principle sided with the teachers and said that they were honest mistakes. But if my mom wasn’t watching, no telling how that could have affected my chances of getting into my private Catholic high school, Bishop Chatard.
I think they were really trying to interfere with me getting in a prestigious high school. They even gave my Catholic scholarship to a non-Catholic just to anger my family. I was technically supposed to be 2nd in my class, but they put another kid in my spot. In the school’s rules, they explained that no kid can move up from 7th to 8th grade in the game year and be salutatorian. They did it anyways. I ended up being 3rd. The priest, who was over the whole school really didn’t do anything, he was really sheepish about settling issues. He went along with the money people instead of listening to the people. Hey, if you piss the money people off, you won’t have money for the church or the school. Unfair, but that’s how it is.
In high school, the same staffers tried to to ask a fellow classmate (and one of their favorites) to keep dibs on what “Peterson” was doing. I found this out because a previous priest would tell the grade school staffers what grades were, what they were doing, etc. I’m not sure why my high school would even allow grade school priests to check up on kids like that. I mean, shouldn’t it be at our discretion what information we reveal? See, my grade school was one of many feeder schools in my high school, and they had weird ways of finding out information. The grade school staffers were not interested in hearing good things about me, they wanted to hear bad things to have something to talk about. (A girl from my grade school got pregnant, and they were looking for some dirt of her, and boy that did it. That’s just the kind of people they are.) But due to fate, my grade school got a new priest, so that gossip channel stopped.
Did they win in the end? Nope. My grades from school has really no impact in my life now (if you read some of my other articles, you will know why I said this). But many of the situations that went down were nearly unforgivable. These stories are an example of the antics some try to pull when you don’t conform. I could tell you more, but I’ll stop here. What’s your horror stories of when you didn’t conform? P.S. I don’t really talk to grade school folks anymore. Honestly, I probably have 2 to 3 people that I call on occasion but that’s it. I don’t really consider people who treated me like that friends.
Hello! I’m Alesha! I’m a musician, actress, entrepreneur and writer and recent hospital patient (I still can’t believe that is real). Follow on Twitter. If you like what I’m writing, give me a heart and share! :) I like hearts.
