You Versus the Challenge

There, wherever you may be, you lay an inch from death in front of the challenge.   

It has insolently come before you, putting your desire, your fire, your hopes on display for its gnarly teeth to clamp down into.  You feel the searing cut of the sharper of the teeth and the unforgiving pressure of the flatter of the teeth.  Before long, not only its teeth gnaws its way through your flesh, but its numerous limbs take seamlessly orchestrated strikes at your weaknesses.  The challenge possesses mental abilities as well, beyond merely brawn and force.  The challenge seems to know that which makes you tremble and fear, that which makes you dread the sunset and the coming of the night and that which keeps you awake at night dreading the start of the day more than its ending.  It threatens your very core and shakes the foundations of your soul as an unexpectant earthquake rips through the hustle and bustle of daily, repeated motion of a grand city on a glorious summer's day.  You are left a-questioning, left fearing.  Indeed, the challenge has disconnected you from your very self.  There seems to be no light, no saviour, no silver lining, no chance for redemption. 


Yet, in the depths of despair, in hell's fury, in the valley of the beast, in the lion's den, you still have something.  You have life!  Life; so glorious a brevity bestowed upon us by the Ancient of Days, which has escaped billions already, but lay kicking, willing, knowing in your bosom.  Life is what you have that the challenge does not have - that which the challenge will never have.  The challenge only seeks to exterminate the very last life from you as you lay writhing in despair in the pit.  Yet, dear reader, you must rise!  Rise from the grave like the phoenix of legend.  Rise to claim the fullness and the abundance of the glory of life that your Maker has given you.  You must claw with your very blood gushing in passion out of that pit.  You must struggle unto your feet with the pride that still remains.  You must raise your eyes and lock your stare with the challenge with the last inkling of courage that remains within you.  Finally, you must turn the challenge upon its head by laying down itself in front of it.  You must provide it with a mirror image of itself within you.  "The challenge is no more external to me, but the challenge is within me!" you must roar, loud and long, to the challenge's ugly head.  The challenge will run in fear, cower and the victim will have become the victor!

Whatever challenge you may be facing as you read this, know that you are able, you are willing, you are courageous, and you WILL overcome!  Think that one day when you are old and infirm, you will long again for these days of blood of sweat of tears for never at any other point in your life than in these days of struggle were you more acutely aware of how alive you are and how glorious it is to be alive.

There is no greater an honour than the fight against the challenge.  Battles with the challenge are said to echo into eternity.

The more difficult the struggle, the more glorious the triumph.
TheLonelyman