Confidence

It is an advantageous thing, I think, to maintain a righteous mind! To have always the confidence to go forward, to move positively in the direction of your most deep-seated goals and dreams; this can only be entitled an attitude to be desired, for it has the benefit of happiness. It alone seems to make or break any man.

 

The ability to know you can do is senior to the knowledge of how I think, for the attitude of failure will crash a plane far more surely than a lack of experience with the will to try. No man fails harder than he who never begins!

I wish to have that always, the mysterious confidence I feel in the oddest of places--just before I hit the cue ball, directly mid a performance on stage and at the head of a classroom. It is Power, the knowledge that I can hold this position for the two counts of eight called for in the choreography; the confidence that an eight ball is about to hit the corner pocket, even before I touch the cue, the attitude of authority which makes 6' teenage boys hop to when I speak despite our disparate heights and indisparate ages.

But what of the other times? When I know I face a dress down at work, or my affinity for someone hits the wall of--why am I the only one putting this forward?

What then? Where does it go, the extraordinary feeling of happiness and confidence I felt mere seconds before, related or not to the object of my doubts and nervousness, when I hit with heart-crushing force a wall of even temporarily monumental proportions! It drains away like sand through my fingertips and no amount of hope or imagination can defy its gravitic pull down into the hole I then fear to escape lest I face derision.

It is a wonderful thing to have this confidence, but we feel the lack thereof that much more keenly when it flees, and reminded again of the old saying–-we are sent down into sorrow–-pride comes always before a fall!