So, Coach Carter happened to be on today when I woke up, and I ended up watching some of it. I’d seen it before, and thought it good, but it’s not up there in my movie picks. I’m not one for sports movies, even if I do find them more interesting than most sports. One of the things that caught my attention was that Samuel L. Jackson (as Coach Carter) asks one of the boys repeatedly “What is your greatest fear?”

It was the answer, however, that really struck a cord. I can’t remember all of it, but it basically goes, “Our greatest fear is not that we shall fail, but that we shall succeed. And by succeeding, out shine all others. But by shining, we allow others to shine as well, etc.”

Lame puns based on misunderstanding the language aside, the answer struck a cord in me. Lately I’ve found myself a bit stuck. trying to figure out both my options and where I want to go with my life. There’s the electrician thing, which I talked about a few months ago. There are schools, but how feasible they are is up to debate. While they are not expensive, at least one of them is free if you qualify, it requires serious time investments which would just about kill most of the life I’ve put together for myself. I still find it interesting, and I’m even thinking of seeing if I can do a “walkabout” our whatever it’s called where I tag along to see what the business is like.

Lately though, I’ve had feelings of wanderlust. I want to travel, see things, meet people. Don’t get me wrong, I like my little area of my home state, what with it’s mountains and woods and stuff (even if I don’t go see them much). But I’ve lived here all my life, more or less. Maybe it’s too much anime, but I want to travel around, righting wrongs and avenging ills. Generally with a war-hammer, but still. Like I said, too much anime. Rogue Priest over on his blog talks about his trip that he’s planning on doing that runs from Mississippi to South America. I’m not that nearly that ambitious. Mostly because I took four semesters of Spanish, managed a C average, and finished speaking not a word of that tongue.

I think I went off on a tangent….

Anyways, I feel stuck and pulled in several directions, unsure of what to do with myself. I suppose the simplest way to solve the problem is to merely Act. I talked before about doing something, regardless of it being right or wrong. Perhaps this is another one of those situations. Maybe I need to just say the proverbial screw it and just jump. But something keeps stopping me. Maybe it’s the constant “reality shovel” that I got hit with by my mother whenever I had a big dream of doing something (that’s great honey, but…here’s all the things that can go horribly wrong and ruin your life FOREVER!!!RAWR!!!) It felt like being slammed in the face with a shovel that then went on to dig a grave for your dreams. Maybe it’s the fear of failure, so often instilled in me by said reality shovel. The one that says you have to always be prepared against every possible bad thing that will happen because if you screw up even once your entire life will be ruined and you will fail all those that count on you. So better to sit back, not try, let someone else handle it, who’s smarter, more experienced, and knows what they’re doing better than you ever could.

Sometimes, I think, my mother didn’t think much of me or my ability.

So it could well be the fear of failure that holds me back.

But there’s that quote. The part that says it is not the fear of failure, but the fear of success. There are times when I have been told I am insanely arrogant. This may or may not be true, as the same person who told me that was the one who kept hitting me in the dreams with the reality shovel.

Yes, its a bit like that.

So perhaps it is my arrogance, but what if I did succeed. I walk the Path of Power, as I put it, or I try to. And if there’s one thing about that path, it’s that it’s the Path of Conflict. You’re going to fight, every minute of every day, and even if you get to the top, you have to fight off everyone that comes wanting to be where you are, or wants to add your corpse to the pile they’re standing on to take themselves higher. My fear isn’t that I would be crushed under the mountain of bodies someone else builds. After all, they day of your death was deigned long ago, hide in a hole if you wish, you won’t live a moment longer. No, it isn’t death that troubles me. It’s that I would succeed, and the wonder of how many bodies would I pile up, and how many of them would be people I care about, in my quest for Power.

My choice will be made, and when it is I won’t look back. You can’t look back, you can only look forwards. But until then, I sit, and I wonder what I should do. Because I want to make sure that it is worth the price I pay to obtain it.