Get Real

Most planetary game-changers were told, “Get real.” They were branded insane, shamed, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The Catholic Church sentenced Galileo to house arrest for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun. Soon afterward Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno proposed that the sun was a star and that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings. Giordano was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. When the judges issued his death decree he told them, “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.” Jonathan Swift later noted, “When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” Einstein echoed, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Every person is potentially great. Are you willing to step into your greatness, claim it, and live it?

The holiday season offers you many opportunities to get real in the presence of people who fear to get real themselves, and call you to play small with them. Regard their resistance as a call for love and an invitation for you to be authentic. When you stand for truth in the presence of illusion, you break the illusion for yourself and for everyone who subscribes to it. Your mission is to remain alive in a world preoccupied with death; to walk tall when others are compromising their integrity; to be who you are while others have forgotten who they are.

Reality is not for sissies. To live authentically in a world steeped in illusion is the gift of lifetime, spreading light in ripples from your own life to the lives of everyone you touch.