Character is destiny

I stumbled on a book by US politician John McCain it is called character is destiny. I discovered it a while ago in my loft. I was going through an old box of books I had ignored for too long. I had purchased the box of books from a car boot sale years before. I read that book a few weeks ago now and one thing remained in my mind. The book itself was just ok, nothing special really but it was the title that stuck in my head. The assertion of our character being destiny.

Can that be true? If so then life is not determined by outside forces or at least not predominantly. Instead our character dictates our future and we end up with what we deserve by being a good or bad person.

Are we all building our own houses? If so then the people we are today contribute to the future we end up living. If that is true then the foundation of our house is our character. No house can sit on rotten foundations long.

The good news for us all is that character is not assigned to us at birth like say a fingerprint. No, we get to work at it, we get to try and be better. It takes deliberate thinking and corresponding action. It just takes a little time.

Enough time to understand how our thoughts become our words and our words become our actions. And enough time to see how those actions become our habits and there we are! Finally, our habits become character.

So I suppose the book title was true after all. Character is destiny, it’s just that destiny can be influenced, by one good thought at a time.