Strength for Today

Pride and fear are wedded in matrimonial heartache. Forever does this inextricable and co-dependent ‘marriage’ contend in weakness as it fabricates its strength on lies.

Every person deals with pride; it is inherently stoic within the human condition. Only recently whilst being fairly challenged about my work, I felt it again; that need to respond to the fear in what I call ‘get-out’ pride, only to feel awful that, again, lies had held sway even for that moment.

Pride protects what it has no authority over.

It layers its crusty veneer over any issue we care to name and then it peels away in the presence of truth almost as easily. With pride, we can run but we cannot hide.

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Knock on the door of bullish pride,

Stand patiently whilst it runs in fear,

Looking for an ‘out’ place that’s denied,

Wherever it goes it is still so near.

Honesty it is which visits just now,

A veneer of fear does come with it,

Don’t give into temptation to row,

Fear as it is, is about to split.

Honesty’s the one of courage to seek,

A quest known down through the ages,

Beckoning the child within now to peek,

Passage which comes to grow through the stages.

Manners are mild to those who’ve beat,

Strident and calamitous moods now crushed,

Finally we are those who meet,

The spirit within found now hushed.

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As the poem commends, we meet with our fear-initiating pride in honesty and it’s blown away for a better and fresher reality to enter.

And we will always stand to win, having first dealt with the non-truth in our performance of life. A pinch of courage was all that was required, like a detonator or a lit fuse to set off that explosive charge of honesty. This is a commitment in simple and powerful moral divinity; and it focuses not on improving others, but improving the self.

Living an honest life—clear of our pride—is strength for today.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.