A Star Toward Which to Press

I've subscribed to "Forbes" magazine for many years. In the back of the magazine, as you may know, there's a page titled "Thoughts on the Business of Life." I always read it for the excellent quotations it carries--like this one by B. C. Forbes: "It is when things go hardest, when life becomes most trying, that there is greatest need for having a fixed goal, for having an air castle that the outside world cannot wreck. When few comforts come from without, it is all the more necessary to have a fount to draw from within. And the man or woman who has a star toward which to press cannot be thrown off the course, no matter how the world may try, no matter how far things may seem to be wrong."

That is one of the most important reasons for having a long-range goal--toward which you're working. I say "one" of the most important reasons, because the most important is the fact that you will in all likelihood reach the goal. The trouble people have is not in reaching their serious goals; it's in establishing them.

But having a worthwhile goal gives you a reason for picking yourself back up and heading off again. It gives you someplace to go. It gives you a reason for getting up in the mornings, especially on those cold, gray, rainy or snowy mornings--mo
ings when you have to mumble to yourself over and over, "Stay with it. Stay with it."

That's when "a star toward which to press" looks bright and beckoning out there in the murk of the morning. And pretty soon, you're on your way again. Later, when things are fine again, you wonder how you could have ever felt so low or even considered giving up for a moment.

Without a goal out there somewhere, it would be a simple matter to become a automation, a cipher, an empty, doll-like figure simply going through the motions: getting up, moving through the day and going to bed again.

Having a goal is why some of the unlikeliest-seeming people--people who seem to us to having nothing whatever to bring happiness into their lives--are often the most cheerful people we'll see all day. You can bet that there's a goal there, something held in the heart and seen only in the mind, toward which they're moving; something that makes it all wonderful to them. In fact, that's the very definition of happiness. We're happiest when we are moving toward something we want to bring about. The secret is in the two words "moving toward."

I remember reading in the book "Papillon"--that incredible tale of multiple escapes from the French penal colony in French Guiana--that no matter what the hardships were or how wretched the escapees' lives, they were filled with joy as long as they were moving toward freedom. Pain, suffering, starvation, exhaustion, constant danger, were all worth bearing as long as they were moving toward freedom.

This is why we need to reaffirm our goals on a regular basis, why we need to make sure we know what it is we're moving toward.

"It is when things go hardest, when life becomes most trying, that there is greatest need for having a fixed goal, for having an air castle that the outside world cannot wreck. . . . And the man or woman who has a star toward which to press cannot be thrown off the course . . . ." nnnn