Heroes..

A recent podcast I frequently listen to, EscapePod, had an interesting story that spoke to racism and bigotry.  While the story was set with science fiction in a future earth, and used cloning as the source of the bigotry, what was much more interesting were some of the comments the narrator made afterwards.  Something he pointed out in his pleasantly British accent, was that we are all Heroes of our own story.

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I had to take pause and think about that for a long moment as I was listening.  The example that he cited, was a mystery novel, where the detective worked so hard through three-quarters of the book before he started to get traction and home in on the suspect.  Where, in the last five pages, a police officer pulls the suspect over for a broken tail light and captures him in a page and a half.  In that page and a half, the police officer, a regular patrolman, was the hero of his own story because he caught the bad-guy!

In that light, we each, are the Hero of our Own Story, our own lives.  Each day we can choose to do great things, or live hum-drum, dreary existance.  But, either way, we are the ones who have the opportunity to craft our own novel, write our own story.  But, as we write our own stories, the stories of our lives each day, we have to focus on doing what would take us along the High Road.  For as we look back along the road we travel, the story we have written, we will find much more joy when we have something that makes us smile, and not feel shameful.

Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason."  Let us strive to avoid this sort of maximizing and minimizing in our lives, for there are so many more things we can put our focus and energy on.  This would not be the sort of story we'd want to see other read about ourselves.