Keep Reaching!

What are you proudest of? Your children, building a company, a house, a physical, emotional, or academic achievement, sticking to a good habit, dropping a bad one, helping someone? I bet most of what brings satisfaction was hard and seemed unreachable until you reached for it.  So, keep reaching.

Today, ironically, the biggest challenge we face is avoiding the lure of doing less, because we are invited to do that all the time, even told to do that. The government tells us we have limits, so let them do it.

The government, media, and social media encourage us to ignore common sense and pay no attention to history, conscience, and our inner quest to dream, challenge, and do what is difficult, maybe nearly impossible.

They lull us into giving up, allowing that pleasant, anesthetizing effect of dependency to settle over us, allow it to take hold, accept it as inevitable, along with a devil-may-care view of the rest, mediocrity.

But is that really who you are, who we are? Is that how America became America? By dependency, punting big dreams, replacing work with a sigh and shrug, no mental mountain climbing or ridge running, just resignation, the flat easy path, taking the low road?

I think not. I think life, at any age, in any place, for anyone who has known the surge of risks taken and dreams realized, who has ever put their life in gear, brought up the throttle, and done something with conviction, perhaps even against the grain – can never go backward.

To me, one truth:  No matter what the government says or does, no matter what lunacy others promote, we always have the integrity of our own mind, power of our own imagination, and ability to control, in every second, how we will act and react to all the nonsense, the pummeling of perfidious pundits.

That brings me back to the big question: Aren’t you most proud of taking risks that paid off, just being yourself, doing things you did not know you could but dared anyway? Having your own “special mix” of faith, fortitude, and “stand back, because I will do this thing”?

Is that not, in the end, what makes us most content? How can the government – or conformity with nutty norms – ever make us happy, if we know within ourselves what we are being told to do is wrong?

What’s the answer? Simple. It does not come from me, or a survey of modern habits, or how people resist this pull to give up. It comes from the past, where the truth got hashed out long ago.

Says the Bible, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That means you must first know and love yourself, respect the unique creation you are, and your individuality, think and imagine for yourself, and chase dreams you form – and can still form. Then … you can best help others.

Bluntly, no matter how much the government tries to give, forgive, demand, shape, or coerce us, the government cannot do that for us, nor help us do that for others. Only we know our dreams, and their power. Only we can elevate, if necessary resuscitate, our ability to think, imagine, and chase them.

Only we can figure out how to shake off the destructive nonsense, misguided modern malaise, the notion that we should hand off individuality, stop dreaming and daring, and let the government do it all.

Old salts were ahead of us, knew it was coming, the lure of mediocrity, the pull of government control. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind; absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world,” wrote Emerson.

What did he mean? That if you know what you think, and what you believe, can concentrate on the authenticity of thought, abide by your own conscience, have your own dreams, and never stop reaching for them, no matter how outlandish, no one can ever control you – ever.  He called that “self-reliance.”

In Hamlet, Shakespeare pitched the same idea. Polonius advises his son: “This above all, to thine own self be true …” Frederick Douglas, 19th-century civil rights leader: “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

The poet Robert Browning gave us a gem, eulogizing ever-hopeful painter Andrea del Sarto: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” 

Here is the nub: Many things are reachable from where you sit, and not much effort is required. Many require no reach at all and actually invite you to limit what you think, imagine, and reach for. The government would like you to settle down, do as they say, and stop thinking, dreaming, and reaching out.

The advice of the ages, Bible, Emerson, Shakespeare, and Browning, says otherwise. They tell us to stand up, think for ourselves, dream, and chase that crazy whisp until we have no chase left, never give up, never step back, and never let others do it for us. I think they are onto something. Keep reaching!

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.