I have dedicated my life to wanting to help others. It is why I became a nurse, and it is why when asked I will mentor anyone who asks for help. I do this because of what so many people have done for me. My hope is that I can be the one to help that person walk through the door of opportunity and become successful. I have been blessed enough to have people come to me and tell me that I played a part in their success. I will always remind them that I may have opened the door, but it was you who decided to walk through and do the work. I have no ego or arrogance about this. The joy I get is seeing another person succeed.
Even when we experience the joy of success we will often focus on the failures. We will say something like, “I give that person every opportunity to better themselves and they blew it.” I would take the failures to heart like I did something wrong. I didn’t understand that sometimes people are not ready. Sometimes the challenges they are experiencing in life get in the way of them grabbing hold of the opportunities that are before them. I have met people like that. I have even given up on people in my life, not realizing that those were the people that needed my help the most. I was once one of those people who was presented with every opportunity, and I choose to live life in the fast lane and eventually I crashed but the difference was I had a mentor that came to me and said, “Charles are you ready now?”
I had a mentor when I first moved to the Berkshires. He was someone I met when I use to workout at one of the local gyms back in1990. I will be honest; I was a very selfish person back then. You cannot be self-absorbed and expect to be a good father or husband. This gentleman was older, and he was in a thirty-year marriage and had raised two children. He used to spot me when I was lifting heavy weights. He would always strike up a conversation with me about what I was doing with my life. I told him I was going to be a nurse. He would tell me how important it was that I be a good father and husband. He said he could see that the life I was living took away from my goals and dreams. He was very blunt with me, saying that I would lose everything if I didn’t change the way I was living. He even offered to help me pay for school. I took his money, but I didn’t use it for school. Guess what happened? He was right, I lost everything including his friendship.
1991 was a difficult year for me. The details for this post are not important but I had to dig myself out of a deep hole. When I began my climb, he was there to help me out. He didn’t say, “I told you so.” He said, “Are you ready now to change your life?” He supported me through school but not with money. He told me I had to work for what I wanted so that it had value for me. But he was there every time I wanted to give up. He was one of the reasons I made it through college.
I honor him by trying to be the kind of person he was. He was the definition of tough love, but he was also the personification of hope and dignity. I hope that I have “paid it forward” what he has given to me. He passed in 2006 from the complications of Parkinson’s disease, but he lives on in the good things I do. Thank you, Mr. H, for believing in me and changing so many lives even though you are no longer with us.
Dignity changing lives one person at a time.
Charles Redd RN
Dignity Freedom Fighter
Dignity Freedom Fighter 