Distance: 4 miles
Time: 35:07
Pace: 8:45
Calories: 591
I love today's Power Song. It reminds me of my younger days. It was one of my favorite songs growing up young in college. But today one of my first songs that came on my Pandora was a song by Ke$ha, We R Who We R.
I enjoy a good song and usually I don't listen to the lyrics but when this song came on I felt my pet peeve creeping in. Okay, this is more of my point view and personal outlook on life but the phrases, "We are who we are" and "We're born this way" and "Do whatever makes you happy" are really annoying. To me those phrases are signs of laziness and ignorance. I say laziness because it's an excuse not to do something hard but worthwhile. I think of the scenario, "Sorry, I have to take drugs, I was born this way" the pit of lazy excuses. "I'm fat because I was born this way." No, you're overweight because of some unhealthy eating habits. I don't buy these ignorant excuses, I just don't.
People can change. People are supposed to change. How do people change? By doing something OUTSIDE your comfort zone. No one reaches new heights without pushing themselves. You cannot expect to wake up one morning and hike up Mount Everest or swim the English Channel. I believe we are more than what we believe we are. I believe we have high capabilities, I believe each person can soar so much higher in this life if we push. Sometimes we need some help. I read an article today from a devotion given on a university campus which I'd like to share with you.
The famed naturalist of the last century, Louis Agassiz, was lecturing in London and had done a marvelous job. An obviously bright little old lady, but one who did not seem to have all the advantages in life, came up and was spiteful. She was resentful and said that she had never had the chances that he had had and she hoped he appreciated it. He took that bit of lacing very pleasantly and turned to the lady and, when she was through, said, “What do you do?”
She said, “I run a boarding house with my sister. I’m unmarried.”
“What do you do at the boarding house?”
“Well, I skin potatoes and chop onions for the stew. We have stew every day.”
“Where do you sit when you do that interesting but homely task?”
“I sit on the bottom step of the kitchen stairs.”
“Where do your feet rest when you sit there on the bottom step?”
“On a glazed brick.”
“What’s a glazed brick?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“Fifteen years.”
Agassiz concluded, “Here’s my card. Would you write me a note when you get a moment about what a glazed brick is?”
Well, that made her mad enough to go home and do it. She went home and got the dictionary out and found out that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That didn’t seem enough to send to a Harvard professor, so she went to the encyclopedia and found out that a brick was made of vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate, which didn’t mean a thing to her. She went to work and visited a brick factory and a tile maker. Then she went back in history and studied a little bit about geology and learned something about clay and clay beds and what hydrous meant and what vitrified meant. She began to soar out of the basement of a boarding house on the wings of words like vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate. She finally decided that there were about 120 different kinds of glazed bricks and tiles. She could tell Agassiz that, so she wrote him a little note of thirty-six pages and said, “Here’s your glazed brick.”
He wrote back, “This is a fine piece of work. If you change this and that and the other, I’ll prepare it for publication and send you that which is due you from the publication.” She thought no more of it, made the changes, sent it back, and almost by return mail came a check for 250 dollars. His letter said, “I’ve published your piece. What was under the brick?”
And she said, “Ants.”
He replied (all of this by mail), “What is an ant?”
She went to work and this time she was excited. She found 1825 different kinds of ants. She found that there were ants that you could put three to the head of a pin and still have standing room left over. She found that there were ants an inch long that moved in armies half a mile wide and destroyed everything in their path. She found that some ants were blind; some ants lost their wings on the afternoon they died; some milked cows and took the milk to the aristocrats up the street. She found more ants than anybody had ever found, so she wrote Mr. Agassiz something of a treatise, numbering 360 pages. He published it and sent her the money and royalties, which continued to come in. She saw the lands and places of her dreams on a little carpet of vitrified kaolin and on the wings of flying ants that may lose their wings on the afternoon they die. [The Gift of Self (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1974), pp. 151–53]
I share this article insert because I believe it captures my thought. We can do more than what we believe we're capable of. Who has ever truly reached their 100% potential in anything? We have more to go, so get out there and do it.
Did you run today?
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