Choosing life

I think I've seen it quite often in the past few months; we shouldn't let emotions get the better of us, especially the bitter, acrimonious feelings that tend to turn people into sullen and petulant beings. We assume that all thoughts and actions emanate essentially from character and personality, but all too often forget that caustic and resentful sentiments and behaviour in turn have the insidious effect of corroding the bits of goodness in people, leaving behind what is acrid and acerbic, like something gone bad.

Two of the greatest tragedies occur when a person's expectations are incongruent with his abilities, or when the circumstances that life deals to him are incommensurate with the potential that nature has endowed him with. But the protagonist in either case need not be a tragic hero, like a Macbeth drawing arms against morality and destiny, nor like a Miltonian Satan falling further into a darkness not of the Deep but of his own creation. A person of real ability would take life into his hands, and not crush it, but shape it into a design of his own choosing.