The Road to Redemption

The world we live in is deceptive.  We are taught sayings like "better safe than sorry" and "better to keep your mouth shut and let them think you are an idiot, rather than open it and remove all doubt" are idioms to live by.  What we are really being told is that taking risks is a bad thing, that living within safe, comfortable bounds is the surest road to success.  The problem is, this is all a lie.  There is absolutely nothing safe about the status quo.  In fact, in the current state of things, it is actually dangerous.  While the world around us is revolving, innovating, and changing, our insistence on remaining the same is foolish and will only hurt us in the long run.  What we really need to do is not keep quiet, but find our voice.
The first step to finding your howl, which is what J. Flaum calls it in his article on changethis.com, is recognizing the lies we are being fed for what they are.  The second step is the hard part.  The second step requires us to do the opposite of what the tiger did in the story told by Flaum's friend Nick.  The tiger, as told by Nick, was trapped in a cage at the zoo.  However, because he was very powerful and could jump very high, he planned his escape from the cage.  When he finally made his move and leapt out of the cage which had no ceiling, he landed in another cage that was adjacent to his own cage.  No matter how many times he jumped out of his cage, he landed in another cage.
Just as the tiger discovered he could not escape the cages, we cannot escape the lies that we have been taught to believe because they have become comfortable, they have become our home.  We cannot just run away from them and cover them up with new ideas because they are so ingrained in us.  We must face them and push our way through them one at a time until we have destroyed the confines of our cages at their foundations and rebuilt ourselves from the ground up.  We must in essence burn down the lives that we have created based on the lies we know, burning ourselves down to the very core.  Only then can we begin to rebuild and find an authentic point from which we can truly speak from our hearts.

This video denotes a passage in the Bible that is very important to me because it allows me to do exactly what J. Baum talked about to find our "howl."