The lie.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway

And there were those who questioned, why I’d quit it! Of course, nobody could really tell them the actual reason why- I had just been too lazy and too afraid. And so there was the lie, followed by an even bigger lie till I started believing in it myself. I even started advocating for the lie, so much so that, when other people used it as excuse, I fought for them, encouraged them and basically told them to believe in themselves, ‘cause hell if I know, I believed in it too.

By the time I was in my late teens, years of lying to me had done the trick. The veracity of the lie was never doubted, the assumptions never questioned and it’s a sad fact that most of the world also came to accept it as true.

And then came these moments when ordinary people faced extraordinary situations, or at least in their minds, as the lie wanted them to believe it. The safety of the lie was so tempting that most succumbed to it, except a few, wary souls. They fought, every moment, when every thought in their head was screaming at them to believe the lie, they quietened the voice down. And they prevailed. And that’s what history teaches us every day- to fight the lie; that there are people out there doing things that are considered impossible to be done; that there’s hope, that there’s faith, in oneself.

And how do you generate the will and the courage to fight the lie. As I saw it in a rather strange movie “The greatest game ever played” when the “hero” was going on a diatribe against the system, - “Let me tell you something. I came here to win a trophy. And on the face of it Ted Ray or I should carry it off. Not for you, not for England, but for sheer bloody pride at being the best, *that's* why we do this”

In other words, he did it “for the love of the game”, for the sheer joy of being the best at what you are. And that’s what drives us ahead. Few, a very select few, of us are lucky enough cause that’s what makes us get up every day in the morning to live our day at the fullest, cause what we are doing is what we love and we don’t care what other people think or say or do- a kind of indifference and apathy to other human beings that comes with the knowledge that we are pursuing a noble goal.

And to end it on a sobering thought is this line from Invictus (Also, cause I got bored and lost track of what I was writing about)

“I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.”