Down the Beaten Path

Down the Beaten Path

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Dare Mighty Things

 
I  love this quote I heard it today and I wanted to share it with you. My daughter has always had a hard time in life...learning has always come at a great struggle for her. Public school wanted to classify her but we knew there was so much more to her than a label. She looks at the world from the opposite direction as the rest of the world, being left handed she comes at a problem from a different direction, and she sees people...truly sees them and still KNOWS they are a child of God.
 
But that doesn't help with learning since schools like to put everyone in the same box when some learn from another box. She is mildly dyslexic, but is a voracious reader she loves Shakepeare, Jane Austen, and anything that is medival. She has a wedding dress picked out that is a Regency style dress like they wore in Pride and Prejudice. She loves the scriptures, is extremely shy, when she gets mad she cries, she doesn't raise her voice, loves animals especially her goats, is a romantic at heart and any boy who wants to capture her heart has  very high standards they must reach. She wants her first kiss to be the boy she will marry and she wants a boy who is her best friend.
 
But then things have always been so hard struggles with learning, fitting in with others, and being painfully shy. We have a saying in our home "What is Normal!" when she was little people would tell me she wasn't normal as they got older my son and daughter would get mad at that statement and decided that normal is boring and what is it anyway who sets that standard? What people didn't understand is that at 4 1/2 she witnessed her parents struggle with the death of her baby brother, us finding he had died in his crib early one morning and trying to perform CPR and seeing her parents fall apart as paramedics took him away. That is devastating to parents but to her who couldn't understand it was a major trauma.
 
This quote reminds me of her struggles and that her struggles will and have made her strong. She is an inspiration to me she doesn't judge people she loves them and how she will fall and stumble and them pick herself up dust herself off and try again and again till she succeeds.
 
  It is not the critic who counts; nor the one who points out how the strong person stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better.
 The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually strive to do deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends oneself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he or she fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
 Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt26th President of the U.S. and
winner of 1906 Nobel Peace Prize

1 comment:

  1. This is beautifully written. It is so true that our world carries so many stereotypes and tries to push us all into them! It makes me so thankful for homeschooling and that all my children and grow and thrive in their own environment of learning. Kuddos to your daughter for staying strong and carrying on! What a beautiful quote too!

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