Daily Meditation March 10, 2022-Acts of Courage

Today’s Quotation:

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that
human history is shaped.  Each time a person stands up for
an ideal or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth
a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring those ripples build
a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls
of oppression and resistance.-Robert F. Kennedy

Today’s Meditation:

Standing up for what’s right can be one of the most difficult things that anyone can do.  When we’re faced with situations in which doing the “right thing” can cause us a significant amount of negativity on the part of other people, it’s much easier to take the easier way out and not say anything, or even worse, agree with something that we know is wrong.

Part of the problem is that usually, we see no immediate positive results of our standing up for what’s right, though we often see very negative results.  It’s easy to hold back from protesting a wrong or praising an unpopular right action when we know that the immediate result for ourselves can be ridicule, anger, or other very negative responses.

But those tiny ripples of hope need to be sent out to join with all of the other ones in the world so that the positive energy and love and hope that we all hope to feel and experience can grow and thrive.  And sometimes, we have to throw out that hope no matter what results in it may bring to us.  Keeping safe and avoiding unpleasantness may help us in the short term, but the long-term effects of not following our conscience have been consistently proven to be very negative.

Injustice is all around us.  Standing up against it isn’t always a great idea–confronting a killer who’s still holding a gun may get us killed, and then how can we help others–but if we search for ways to stand up and give voice to that which we know is right, we can enrich our lives and give ourselves a deeper sense of satisfaction concerning our contribution to this world.

Questions to ponder:

1.  How can we deal with people
who don’t seem to want to hear what’s right?

2.  How do we define right and wrong?  Is our perspective
necessarily the best one for everyone on any issue?

3.  Why is it hard to stand up for the right and the just?
Is it necessary to do so if we want to live full lives?

For further thought:

We must have the courage to bet on our ideas, take the
calculated risk, and act.  Everyday living requires
courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.-Maxwell Maltz