With love comes happiness. With forgiveness comes liberation. With pain comes glory. With originality comes ingenuity. With failure comes knowledge. With knowledge comes ability, in which combined with ambition, a work ethic, and perseverance comes success. With compassion comes mercy. Love hard. Forgive. Be aware. Be you. Be Great.

STRIVING FOR GREATNESS

LIVING THE GOOD LIFE INSIDE OUT!By JESSE M. GRIFFIN III

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Jesse M. Griffin III
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-4111-1

Chapter One

MOVING FORWARD

LETTING GO

When you inherit life, you inherit all of its counterparts as well—its highs, lows, pleasures, and pains. As a product of your ancestors, you already may understand that you retain select genetics of those individuals. What you may not know, however, is that in being their descendant, you also are the bearer of consequences that resulted from some of the decisions they made in their lives. For instance, this may entail the poverty stricken community you reside in—being that their lack of ambition and quest for better living circumstances has left you with no choice. This, as another example to give, may entail risk factors that have been conditioned into your DNA that can contribute to you developing perilous physical conditions such as heart disease or high blood pressure because of the type of lifestyle they maintained—being a poor diet or lack of exercise.

In spite of this reality, nevertheless, you do not have to be confined to many of those conditions they arranged. You can change those conditions and shape them to be whatever you want your children, grandchildren, and the generations to follow to inherit. But you first must possess and maintain the proper qualities that will allow you to do so. One of those qualities is the ability to move forward.

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

—Barack Obama

SORROW

The hardest part of dealing with a difficult situation is accepting its harsh reality, but there is a reason why people were created with eyes in the front of their heads and not in the back.

Aphorisms, such as "Life goes on" and "It's going to be all right," are often unpleasant for a person to hear when he or she is dealing with a crisis. They are hard to accept because the pain the heart is feeling does not want to allow the mind to conceive the thought. It rejects it because of the overwhelming effects that sorrow produces, such as grief, guilt, or emptiness.

Sorrow is a difficult emotion to endure—maybe the hardest of all. Most commonly experienced when you lose someone, or suffer a disconnect from someone with whom you have a strong, positive emotional connection to, sorrow can also be triggered by other instances, such as the loss or theft of a sentimental item, making a poor decision, or disputes with family, companions, or friends. In spite of sorrow's apparent dismal nature, nevertheless, it can have both negative and positive effects.

Negative Effects

Self-pity is the product of being immoderately sorrowful. It is a person's excessive, self-absorbed discontent over his or her troubles and misfortunes that make him or her wish they could rewrite a few pages in their life's history book. Sometimes people become so consumed by self-pity that they never realize it is the reason why some of their circumstances are what they are, and let me illustrate how.

Self-pity, in many cases, takes away all enthusiasm and blocks potential positive action because it surrounds the mind with negative thoughts that fuels negative emotions such as insecurity, anger, or depression. These types of emotions tend to encourage people to ignore logic and base much of their actions off of how they feel—and this is the reason why a majority of a self-pitiful person's behavior and decisions become irrational. The compilation of irrational act after another, therefore, is what dictates the unfavorable circumstances they are subjected to deal with.

I personally find it ironic that many people allow self-pity to play a big role in their lives, but they do not want to be viewed as having the one thing it represents the most: weakness. Many people want others to recognize them as mentally strong; as in being confident, emotionally intact, scholastically intelligent, and street smart—but in truth, however, being a slave to self-pity can only make them the opposite of these things.

They cannot have a high level of confidence, because their obligation to feel sorry for themselves causes them to develop and employ introverted tendencies that makes them feel inferior, such as insecurity and bashfulness. They cannot be mentally strong, because their sorrow, which consumes them, makes them emotionally unstable, causing them to be inconsistent with making rational decisions. In addition, other effects that can stem from self-pity—such as ignorance, or defiance—can cause them to seem somewhat incompetent or inept, even if they happen to be very cerebral.

Positive Effects

When sorrow is moderated, however, it actually can have positive effects. It keeps a person on their toes and makes them understand that he or she is human, just as everyone else is. That person may realize that no matter how good things get, he or she shouldn't become arrogant or complacent about their fortune. At the same time, it also can reinforce to that individual that although what he or she is going through is bad, it could be worse—especially since they may have knowledge of terrible things that others have endured. And this breakthrough is what may make him or her a little bit more grateful that their situation is not as critical.

FORGIVENESS

Moving forward means letting go, and a big part of letting go is forgiveness. To forgive means to excuse or pardon someone for a fault or an offense they have committed against you, but society has developed an interpretation of forgiveness to be that you approve of or accept something offensive or disrespectful that another person has done to you. This, however, is far from the case. Your forgiveness is never for the benefit of the culprit by letting him or her "off the hook." It always is for your emotional and physical benefits. When you forgive, you no longer immoderately dwell on things that have been done to you, over which you have no control or ability to change—and begin to focus on doing things to help you improve your present circumstances.

Forgiving yourself, as well as forgiving those who have committed ill will toward you, can also be physically and emotionally beneficial to people who have nothing to do with your experiences. It prevents you from using those people as outlets for your anger, which can, in turn, prevent them from developing negative emotions due to your distasteful actions towards them.

Revenge is a component of unforgiveness that may feel good during the heat of the moment, but is only a temporary fulfillment. It is not a permanent solution for dealing with self-pity, because after experiencing revenge's jubilation, you can still be stuck in the emotional trap that you have allowed your unfortunate experiences to put you in.

Now, of course you are not required to forgive; the choice to do so will always be yours. There are a couple of things, however, that you should understand about forgiveness. The first thing is that forgiveness is the first aid for healing many of the open emotional wounds that you may have developed from your life's experiences. Forgiveness is about relinquishing self-bondage, only to acquire self-liberation. Holding on to resentment or grudges, therefore, only prevents you from obtaining self-liberation, and forces you to become a prisoner of your own mind.

The other...