Do not regard your opportunities as mere visages floating in the horizon of your life, or autumn leaves driven by the winds of chance across your path. Every opportunity far from being a thing of chance, is a product of definite causes. Opportunity is unrealized possibility supplemented by conditions favorable for the execution of a purpose. And the power lies within you to create circumstances. That skillful artist, the human brain, draws a mental picture--an idea, the judgment approves, the will renders a decision to create that idea into actual being; in other words, gives it a soul, and then we have opportunity made real by the process of a creative force.
We are apt to regard this quality in our existence as a somewhat superhuman term, an abstraction beyond the realm of common life, or at most an asset within the reach of a favored few; whereas it is a common attribute playing a potential part in our every-day activities. In its very nature opportunity is democratic and goes, like a wayfarer, knocking at the gates of every man's life.
This messenger of fate, however, will not knock at the door of that man who is unable to meet the demands it would make upon him. It ever recognizes the eternal fitness of things, since it looks to its own promotion as well as the promotion of him who seeks to embrace it. Opportunity, then, is not opportunity at all if a man is not equal to it. When the steam engine lay in its elementary state in the great laboratory of nature, it was an opportunity for James Watt; and by his accepting it, opportunity realized its own fulfillment, became its own blessing and a blessing to all mankind. The unskilled laborer who dug out the ore could not claim this opportunity because he was not equal to its requirements.
Moreover, every man is himself an opportunity of infinite greatness. And he who depends upon the world alone to furnish him opportunities is destined to meet with failure. Self-reliance is the passport to success. The man who is continually bemoaning a lack of opportunity acknowledges his own lack of resources--is wanting in creative force. Every golden moment is an opportunity for him to step out from the shadows into the sunshine. Optimism sees opportunity in the ordinary jog-trot of daily duty.
One of the most valuable assets which we can possess is the ability to mold from the adverse circumstances about us our opportunities. And "a wise man," says Bacon, "will make more opportunities than he finds." When Michael Angelo takes the castaway rock which he finds in his path and carves from it "The Young David;" when Herschel at the midnight hour, after playing his violin for a living, goes out and studies the star-lit skies, the field of his immortal conquest; when Elihu Burritt, working at the forge, grapples with mathematics, and masters several languages; when obstacles are overcome, and adversity yields to the invincible wills of men, then has opportunity by this self-made principle been hewn out of the very stumbling blocks which were in the way.
Every man is a treasury of untold wealth. He is not great merely for what he is, but for the greatness of his possibility--that undreamed grandeur which opportunity is ever seeking to reveal. True greatness does not emanate from the power of genius so much as it does from the wise discrimination which we exercise in the choice of our opportunities, and the intelligence with which we lay hold upon them. It is a fine art in life to know just the thing to do, and the opportune moment for doing it. Eternal vigilance is the price we must pay, and the constant whetting of our faculties.
Our life is a succession of opportunities. Yet however numerous they may be, or however bright, they are not availing until placed into the crucible of experience. Gold, silver, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds--all the precious jewels imbedded in the treasure-house of nature, become valuable to us only when we dig them out, polish and shape them for our use. Likewise our opportunities enrich us only as we reach out after them and make them an abiding element in our life.
But to know one's opportunity when he sees it, is the secret of life's great problem. "Know thy opportunity," is the motto of Pittacus of Mitylene, one of the seven wise men. It is inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. And each day, in the temple of our memory, we should write it anew. For the practical question is not whether we are making the most of our opportunities, but whether we are conscious of them at all.
Moreover, to know them instantly as well as to know them instinctively is essential to our well-being. When Victor Hugo charges us to take all reasonable advantage of that which the present offers, he reveals the true character of opportunity. It lives only in the present tense, it knows no to-morrows, and makes a record of the yesterdays only when it has found lodgment in our lives.
Suppose DeWitt Clinton, denounced and ridiculed, had been led into the belief that his idea was a mere phantom, a mystic nightmare, the Erie Canal would not be a reality. Suppose Robert Fulton had accepted the issuing vapor of the tea-kettle as a mere phenomenon without seeking in it the opportunity for a mighty purpose; suppose that Cyrus W. Field or Marconi, or Edison or Ericsson, or the hundreds of others who by their inventive genius have been a blessing to mankind, had been contented with simply dreaming of the stupendous undertakings which they achieved!