Personal Discovery: Principles to Live By Part 2

But we must be realistic also. There are times that following your principles may land you in troubled times, reduced circumstances, or downright punishment. In fact, in some cases, it may seem as if their principles ruined their lives.

There was a Japanese ambassador in World War II era Lithuania. The Soviet Union had ordered the international consulates to close. Once the consulates were closed, the gates of escape would be forever shut. On July 27, 1940, the Japanese Consul, Chiune Sugihara, looked out the window to see a huge crowd of refugees pressed around the gate of the Japanese consulate. Against the orders of his superiors, he issued visas to hundreds of Jews, hand-writing each one. He worked 18-20 hours a day until the final day of August 28^th. When he was finally forced to leave, he sat in a hotel lobby and then later sitting on the train preparing to leave, frantically writing visas. He didn’t have his official stamps with him then but kept working hoping they’d be accepted. He felt that, though it was against orders, to not do so would be against his principles. Afterwards, when he arrived back at Japan, he lost his position for disobeying his superiors and most of the rest of his life was mired in poverty. However, he had saved thousands of people’s lives. It is estimated that 40,000 descendants of those given visas are alive today. He was taught to live with duty, honor, and dignity and to not only die bravely, but to live courageously.*

Those are true principles. The ones that we follow no matter what, that we believe is the correct way to lead our life even if others say otherwise. This is not to say to follow a destructive path, especially if you know it’s destructive, merely because we are being stubborn about it. This is not only rather unintelligent, but incredibly harmful. It is in genuinely believing that what we are doing is correct and our true path, something that is true to the person that we are and the life we want to live and the world we want to leave to our children, that is the path to follow. If we live in this way, then we can say for sure we tried our hardest to make the world a better place.