Take A Stand

Most of us have been taught to avoid bullies at all cost. The hardest lesson to learn is when you have to stand up to them. From time to time we have all experienced first hand knowledge of dealing with a bully. Sometimes you have to stand up to them in order to maintain your life or your principles. You can't do it from brute force. At least some of us are, how should I say it, a little more delicate than most people. Sometimes I feel that those suffering from depression seem to attract more bullies or they think they can attack someone weaker. I have no proof of that, just a feeling. When confronting a bully, you need to come from an inner strength.

Let me tell you about two occasions that show this. On one occasion a female bully was upset with me. She came over and slapped me and started screaming. I remained calm and quiet with my head held high and smiling. This of course angered her more. I knew she weighed considerably more than I did and she was a lot bigger than I was. I was only 4'10 1/2" and weighed 90 lbs. She was almost six foot and weighed close to 200 lbs. Some of my friends kept her from hitting me but could not control her verbal attack. I drew on my inner strength knowing that I had done nothing to provoke this type of behavior. So I remained calm and smiled. She stormed off.

Later that day when she had had time to calm down, she returned to me in a calm manner and said, "I'm sorry." Then asked, "How could you stand their smiling at me with me saying all those things to you?' We were then able to talk peacefully and resolve the misunderstanding that we had that had started the whole thing. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs, you can bring the other person to the point where you can find a solution in a calm manner.

On the other occasion, it was at Christmas time and I was shopping with about $400-500 cash in my purse. I had been taking karate for about six weeks. My Grandmaster had taught us that 90% of the time you can defend yourself from attacks with demonstrating confidence in your abilities to fight with martial arts.

Back to the story, one of the sales ladies in a store at the mall told me that she noticed a man following me and wanted to know if he was with me. It wasn't and she told me to be careful that there had been several attacks on customers during the Christmas shopping time. So I decided to call it a day and made my way to my car. When I was about a car away from it, I felt a man's hand fall firmly on my shoulder. I felt courage rise up inside me.

I quickly turned, dropped my purse, yelled and prepared to fight for all that I was worth with the martial art training that I had. The 6'4 guy that looked to be about 280-300 lbs. turned faster than I did and ran. I smiled with my head held high. My inner strength and confidence won out over brute strength and he wasn't going to stick around to find out how much I knew. My Grandmaster loves telling the story to all new students. It gives them inspiration.

In our world, unfortunately is laced with lies, cries, neighs, rites and crimes. Learning to take a stand is sometimes hard. No one said life would be easy, but learning to take a stand is worth it.