“True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path and fearlessly following it.”
-Ghandi
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.”
-Jesus
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
– Abraham Lincoln
I love people who are passionate about something, whether or not I agree with them or not. Vegetarians are people who I have great respect for (not to mention my Raw Food Vegan friends), because they are willing to completely go counter to everything they were raised to believe in their life. They are generally mocked, and made fun of because it seems so ridiculous. The thing with vegetarians, is that there is something deep going on with their decision. In many cases, it is not shallow (yes yes, I know there are exceptions). Meat eaters on the other hand, have no reasons for eating meat besides they love it so much and couldn’t imagine a life without it. I’m not even a vegetarian, and yet there is something about their lives that screams truth.
It’s so easy to make fun of the different ones; the ones who are trying new things, exploring new options and saying things that are so different than anyone else. It is so easy to disregard the person who seems to disagree with everything as just a negative person, without really listening to why they disagree with it all. It’s way easier to assume we are right about everything, so to think that someone could have something wrong with every single thing that I do is just annoying, so we ignore them.
The problem is that anyone who has ever changed the world is someone who is not anything like what we know and what we are comfortable with. It is the people that make us feel uncomfortable, disagree with us and constantly bombard us with their crazy talk that we should probably be listening too more intently.
I guess there is a reason why it’s a narrow path and doesn’t seem to have much traffic. The main issue, in almost every case that I’ve seen is that the narrow path is almost always the most inconvenient path. This means you have to recycle, do a compost, not buy bottled water, meet your neighbours, live more simply and stop buying stupid stuff. It’s annoying, nobody else really cares about it and frankly it’s extremely inconvenient. So instead of deciding that they are right with these ideas, we pass it off as unrealistic or just a waste of time.
The wise leaders above had something right. In almost all cases, the majority is probably heading in the wrong direction. Majority loses in this situation. If you are going to default. Default against the flow, not with it. You will be seen as a troublemaker or a pessimist at times, but it is a better way to live. The flow is not healthy and in most cases it is a path that ends up in destruction. Create your own path, learning from the mistakes of the regular path and try to follow in the faint footsteps of the very few who have traveled before you.
I like what Kierkegaard says the majority and Christianity.
“When all are Christians, Christianity ‘ipso facto’ no longer exists.”
It’s an interesting idea. If everybody in North America or Nigeria became a “Christian” you’d have to ask yourself what the nature is, or what’s the reality is, of this majority sort of Chrisitianity. Didn’t Jesus say something like the way to destruction is really wide and broad, and the way to life is narrow and only a few find it? What does this mean in a North American or Nigerian context for example?