_________________________________________________________________________________
“What is a LEADER?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“A LEADER isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. It’s realizing that every experience develops some latent force within you.1 You begin to understand that vision is the art of seeing the invisible2 so that when you want to build a wagon, you don’t gather the other toys to collect wood or assign them tasks, but rather you teach them to long for ways to traverse the endless immensity of the backyard.3 Then you become a LEADER.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are a LEADER you don’t mind being hurt. Leaders don’t inflict pain. They bear pain.” 4
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. And while talent will get most of the attention, it is… a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece… by thought, choice, courage, and determination.5 Generally, by the time you are a LEADER, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.
“But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are LEADER, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious … these will be things you think about.” 6
“I suppose you are real LEADER?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
“The Boy’s Uncle taught me that real LEADERS never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny their own experience or convictions,” 7 he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are a Real LEADER you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always. Because you know that everything can be taken from you but one thing: the last freedom… to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 8
The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic happened to him. He longed to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him. It would take him time to learn how many cares disppear when you decide not to be something, but to be someone.9
______________________________________________________________________________________
hoping that Margery Williams wouldn’t mind my re-telling of her most excellent story (and one of my favorites), The Velveteen Rabbit. The wonderful illustration is by William Nicholson.
Further, I hope those below don’t mind my fitting their quotes into this story…
1 John R. Miller
2 Jonathan Swift
3 Antoine de Saint-Exupery
4 Max DePree
5 John Luther
6 Philippians 4:8
7 Dag Hammarskjold
8 Victor Frankl
9 Coco Chanel
____________________________________________________________________________________
“Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills — against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men (and women) moved the world, and so can we all.”
Robert F. Kennedy
59 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
well intentioned though it was
it is best to pull it. People have been getting sued for doing just this type of thing.
Instead, link to it and add your own thoughts.
🙂
well done, with many tasty layers of meaning!
fuck copyright. :-p
I think Ms. Williams would definitely approve.
Everything in that TVR image looks like it’s bleeding.
Love the picture and the quotes.
And the red horizontal lines rock.
It feels good too. Thanks for the smiles!
So I guess that means that when somebody goes all out to try and hurt you, to ‘inflict pain’….when they dig deep down and use against you that one thing that keeps you up at night….that one thing that you were never willing to share with anybody else, but you told her all about it (*everything* about it) because you thought she was special, because you thought you could trust her, because you thought there was actually something there, because you ignored every single sign that you saw and sensed along the way saying “Don’t go anywhere near this one! You’re only going to ‘f’ yourself in the end! Nothing good can ever come of this!”….but see, I kicked those voices out of my head. I saw what was coming. I’d been through it a dozen times before, and I’ll probably go through it a dozen times more…but I won’t give up. I won’t stop trying. Maybe that’s my problem? I don’t listen to myself, I don’t use my brain….
But anyways – I saw what was coming, I knew what would happen…but I went ahead with it anyways. And it happened. I was right again. I take chances. They always blow up in my face. I’ve made dozens of huge mistakes over the past decade, but at least I have very few, if any, regrets. That’s the tradeoff. I guess, in the end, I’d rather ‘bear the pain’ now; rather than find myself sitting in a room somewhere 30 years down the road and saying “What if…”…
Maybe that makes me a leader, then? At the very least, I do take control of my own destiny…and I’ve come close to blowing everything too many times, way too close for comfort this last time….
But I’m still here.
I don’t know, though – sometimes it feels like the only thing that I ‘lead’ is my head straight into a wall…over and over again. I keep beating it against that wall, but the wall won’t give. But….maybe if I smack it harder and faster, and quicker (!)…and *harder*, and more often!!!
Hasn’t worked so far.
One day, maybe…
Or maybe, a better idea? Maybe one day I’ll use my head for different purposes, and listen to what I know and have learned and try to keep myself out of these situations in the first place…
Maybe one day.
It’s kind of hard, though…when the only real lesson you’ve learned from life so far is that those you trust will always betray you, will always turn on you and not be there when you need them….that’s the lesson of my life. Every single person I’ve ever trusted, without fail, has turned on me. I’m sure I have some sort of ‘attachment disorder’ for which I try to overcompensate. So maybe I go to the opposite extreme, and ‘attach’ myself too easily, with reckless disregard for myself. Okay, yeah – I definitely do that…
Am I making any sense here?
No? That’s fitting though, because nothing I do really makes any sense….
I’m just rambling on, and trying to work some things out…
They look better in writing.
So anyways, yeah….
Maybe it’s a good thing sometimes to have somebody reveal their true selves to you like that. In public, no less. To take the absolute lowest cheap shot possible at you….to bring up again the situation that pretty much led to your leaving where you just came from to begin with, and to do so while also taking the ‘anti-you’ side in that same matter, even though that person knows the truth of that matter and should realize, from what they’ve gone through themselves, that things aren’t always so ‘cut and dry’….
Maybe they’re ‘leading’ in that situation? No. They’re not ‘taking charge’ of anything. They’re just taking out their ‘revenge’ on you for what they’ve gone through. I hope it was worth it to them, then, in that case. I hope they got what they wanted. I hope they don’t spend too much time in the future thinking about what they threw away. Because in spite of everything else, I still somehow can’t bring myself to feel any sort of anger or bitterness towards them…
I hope they got what they wanted (and needed) out of using me…
Add another scar to the collection, but I’ll survive and move on. And find myself in a better place very soon. I always have, and I always will…..
Some people are just rotten. I tend to find myself deeply involved with a disproportionate amount of them, unfortunately. I hope to reverse that trend very soon….
I will.