We need a hero!
We all need heros. We dream of people that will swoop in and make things work when everywhere we turn, things seem to be a mess. We pray for them, worship them, incorporate them into our images of what we wish for society. And yet, when we find them, we search for ways to prove them flawed. We crave and fear our heros, because we want to find them in ourselves.
The truth of the matter is, we each need to be the heros in our own lives. No one's going to swoop down and save us from our problems. There is no mommy waiting to sooth our scraped knees and broken hearts of the soul. We have to fight our own battles or resign from the playing field already lost.
What does it mean to be our own hero? How can we live that way? We need to start by refusing to wait for someone else to bail us out of our problems. As much as we might wish for someone to save us, as long as we sit and wish, we aren't moving forward to solve things ourselves.
A hero is a perfect person that solves things the way we wish they'd be taken care of. This person comes and solves all the problems, saves us from ourselves or the bad guy, and flies away without asking for anything for themselves. People like this don't exist. We might wish they did, or even wish we were them, but it doesn't work that way. We all have day jobs, lives, things we need to do that prevent us from being able to just rescue people. Daily life and our own families come first, and have to come first. And we can't just drop everything to rescue strangers every time someone needs to be rescued. Often, we don't even know the problem is there.
We need to learn to be our own heros. To rescue ourselves from our problems. As long as we wait for someone else to do it, it will never get done.
Questions:
What do you want to be rescued from? What keeps you from doing it yourself?
If you could change anything about your life to rescue yourself, what is it? Can you focus on the possible, or only on the dream?
What value does the dream of a hero hold to you? What would you do to be a hero yourself?
The truth of the matter is, we each need to be the heros in our own lives. No one's going to swoop down and save us from our problems. There is no mommy waiting to sooth our scraped knees and broken hearts of the soul. We have to fight our own battles or resign from the playing field already lost.
What does it mean to be our own hero? How can we live that way? We need to start by refusing to wait for someone else to bail us out of our problems. As much as we might wish for someone to save us, as long as we sit and wish, we aren't moving forward to solve things ourselves.
A hero is a perfect person that solves things the way we wish they'd be taken care of. This person comes and solves all the problems, saves us from ourselves or the bad guy, and flies away without asking for anything for themselves. People like this don't exist. We might wish they did, or even wish we were them, but it doesn't work that way. We all have day jobs, lives, things we need to do that prevent us from being able to just rescue people. Daily life and our own families come first, and have to come first. And we can't just drop everything to rescue strangers every time someone needs to be rescued. Often, we don't even know the problem is there.
We need to learn to be our own heros. To rescue ourselves from our problems. As long as we wait for someone else to do it, it will never get done.
Questions:
What do you want to be rescued from? What keeps you from doing it yourself?
If you could change anything about your life to rescue yourself, what is it? Can you focus on the possible, or only on the dream?
What value does the dream of a hero hold to you? What would you do to be a hero yourself?
posted by Vieva @ 3:29 PM
1 Comments:
At 11:16 PM,
Anonymous said…
I really like this one, Shadow. People spend too much time waiting for that rescueing hero; and yes, sometimes some folks do need an outside hand. But more often, it is simpler to wait for someone else to take responsibility for fixing the problem. That is really what it is about, of course: responsibility!
I do take responsibility for myself, I recognized that I needed to stop bitching about the issues in my marriage that made me unhappy if I was unwilling to either fix them or walk away. And in my efforts to help others, I learned (the hard way) that you really can't "liberate" anyone who isn't interested in doing it for themselves. If someone IS ready and needs help, its dandy to swoop in like Superman and give them a boost; otherwise, its asking for heartache and blame when they fall back into the same pool of misery from which you rescued them.
So, how does one live the heroic ideal? Look around for what needs done that nobody is doing. Volunteer work is heroic at times. And self-care can be heroic in some circumstances (lonely folks are bad at self care because of loneliness for instance--so being otherwise IS heroic). It's heroic to do something that is unsung, unpopular, or misunderstood, so long as it needs doing.
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