What to Do When You Are Chased by a Snake

I lived for several years on Japanese island of Okinawa. It is a tropical island setting with a wealth of beauty and lots of things to do. We lived on side of a mountain that overlooked Pacific Ocean. The beauty that we were able to observe from there was breathtaking. There were a lot of enjoyable things about living in Okinawa, but one of things that I enjoyed most was learning to scuba dive. The island itself is a coral reef island so it is surrounded by all different types of coral - different colors, different shapes. There are also dozens of varieties of tropical fish. And water was as clear as a bell. Even from surface, by wearing a mask, you could see all of beautiful sea life that was thirty or forty feet down. But for a diver, it is not just sea life. Different parts of island have very different terrain, and you didn’t even have to have a boat to enjoy it. In most places you can just swim out a few feet and have a great dive in water that is anywhere from fifty to one hundred and twenty feet deep. In some places there is a wall. You swim out and all of a sudden bottom goes from twelve feet to sixty feet deep straight down. Other places have caverns or giant boulders or wavy hills. So much variety. Of course, scuba diving can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing. That is why people who want to take up sport have to get training. There is an actual certification that a person must get in order to participate in sport. In certification class you study all of things you need to know to be safe. You learn how to use equipment and actually practice doing it. You learn how to calculate length of time you can dive at different depths so as not to get bends. And, of course, you learn about different kinds of sea life - particularly about creatures that can be dangerous. One day I was out diving with a friend and I came across a brown water snake. There were two kinds of snakes in waters of Okinawa. Both are poisonous, but brown ones are more so, and they are more aggressive. Well, I didn’t see this snake until I was fairly close to him and when he saw me, he started coming at me. I had seen this kind of snake before and always steered clear, but had never had one come toward me. I had been told that they won’t mess with you unless you mess with them, but for some reason this guy started coming and kept coming. Now I don’t like snakes, to begin with, and especially poisonous ones. When I saw him coming, I turned around and swam away as fast as I could. After I had gone a little ways I looked back and, to my surprise, he was still coming. You guessed it, I swam even harder. That rascal chased me close to forty yards before he finally gave up. Well, I knew that he wouldn’t chase me forever and that if I could move out of his territory he would leave me alone. If I had not known what to do, though, I might have tried to attack him back or do something else stupid that would have caused disastrous results.

The Four Foundations for Gaining Control of Your Life Knowing what to do is not something that just happens to us. We have to take time and make effort to figure out what we need to know, then go after it. We have to prepare. But we also need whole picture. If we prepare in wrong areas, or if our preparation is incomplete, we will end up as if we had never done any preparation at all. This principle applies to every arena of life - to our family, our job, our sports activities and every other area. Since principle is so pervasive, it is important to make sure we completely understand it so we can use it in life. People tend to be way too narrow in way they apply growth principles to life. It is not possible to select one or two elements of life to grow in and neglect rest. The areas that are not strong will, eventually, pull down even areas that are strong. We have to develop our whole self all time. So just what are areas that we have to focus on? Well, there are four.

Why do you need to have burning desire?

Burning desire to be or do something gives us staying power--a reason to get up every morning or to pick ourselves up and start in again after a disappointment.When you want a thing deeply, earnestly and intensely, this feeling of desire reinforces your will and arouses in you determination to work for desired object. When you have a distinct purpose in view, your work becomes of absorbing interest. You bend your best powers to it; you give it concentrated attention; you think of little else than realization of this purpose; your will is stimulated into unusual activity, and as a consequence you do your work with an increasing sense of power.Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as fruit of desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually. Behind every desire is a deeper desire. Behind deepest of desires, you'll find true identity of person you are.