Do not trouble your hearts with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them. – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Almost interesting is we came across The Lord of the Rings completely by accident. We had heard of it, but generally we are not fans of this type of book but we were bored at work one night circa 1998 and a co-worker had left his copy lying around. We picked it up and opened it to a random page and were immediately and for good captivated by the writing and The Lord of the Rings added almost four dozen quotes to our personal quote book.
Today’s Thought has always got us thinking. We do not believe in predestination. Even back when organized religion held some sway over our life, we didn’t believe there was a Supreme Being pulling the strings on our human experience. With our spiritual life now centered around the Chinese discipline known as Tao, we believe it even less.
We do, though, believe what we get out of our lives usually depends on what we put into it, that the difference between success and failure is often the effort someone puts in and that an awful lot of success is there for the taking if we would only put the required work in.
Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet…
We must be on our path, maximizing the talents nature issued us at birth and putting the circumstances that appear throughout our lives to work for us. When we do that, when we follow our hearts and trust our instincts, what is meant to happen in our lives generally happens.
There are no guarantees, of course. There are over seven billion of our fellow humans on this planet, all leading rather random lives and sometimes circumstances we have some zero control over take precedence over what we are working for.
But not all the time. Sometimes those same seven billion random lives propel us farther than even we thought we could go. We won’t know until we try because we will never climb Mount Everest wandering around the Gobi Desert and those on their path may well find their Mount Everest was always there for the taking.
