An Ode to Action

This was a journal entry of mine from today.

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While I do thoroughly enjoy any book I can get my hands on, I must temper my resolve to avoid becoming enraptured with knowledge, while at the same time neglecting the necessary element of action. If I simply absorb all that I learn and store it away in the crevices of my mind, my life will not be complete, nor will my strength of character be. I would be a boat on the open sea with no captain to guide her, a guitar on a stage with no musician to create a song, a museum with artifacts and ancient wonders packed into its sacred and coveted halls with no curious professor present to marvel at its history. In all these instances, there is emptiness, even despair.

I must not only lift weights and run on a treadmill; I must then help my neighbor move or run a marathon, or better yet, run alongside my future grandchildren. 

I must not only study the works of Plato and Jordan Peterson, or obtain degree after academic degree; I must then improve my character, revel in difficulty, and help others achieve their goals, working at whatever I do with excellency and competency, and raising my children to be respectable and capable individuals.

I must not only read the Bible and pray; I must then love my neighbor and my enemy, feed the hungry, give to the poor, open my house to those around me, and invest selflessly in my community, all with a kind, humble, and cheery disposition, proclaiming Christ in all I do and say, out of the love I have for the Almighty God, who first loved a meddling and idle sinner like me.

"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life." -Muhammad Ali

"Get action. Do things; be sane; don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action." -Theodore Roosevelt

"For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, his is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." -James 1:23-25, KJV

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-JDH