What Stops You?
- Madelyn Hamilton
- Nov 20, 2020
- 1 min read
Freddie was playing in the field when he came across nettles. Curious about the nature of the plant, he reached out and touched it. In an instant, he was running home to his mother. Crying he said, “my hand hurts a lot and I only touched it gently.”
His mother said, “Freddie, it hurts because you brushed it. Next time grasp it boldly and it will be soft as silk and not hurt you.”.
The moral to this Aesop's Fable* is: “Whatever you do, do it with all your might.”
I took a little liberty in paraphrasing the story. However, its essence remains true. It reflects the power of being bold in what we want from life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Whatever you can do or dream you can - begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” This beautiful quote hung on the Vice Principal’s office during my graduating year in high school. So powerful was it (to me), I begged that he give it to me. Which he did. To my teenage mind it symbolized everything I wanted from life. Today, I recognize it as a beautiful road map to a fulfilled life.
What’s stopping you from boldly grasping life? *Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE.
