This week I read this excerpt from Napoleon Hill’s classic, Think and Grow Rich.

“A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe, whose men outnumbered his own. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing the men before the first battle, he said, “You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores unless we win! We now have no choice—we win—or we perish!”

They won.  Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn ships.  The word ‘decide’ means to ‘cut away from’.  When we make a clear decision for what we really want in our life, often it requires that we ‘cut away from’ anything that is unlike that clear choice.  Sometimes this cutting away is painful, especially when it involves cutting away from people or communities we have loved.  But if we are to move into the next phase of our evolution, the next turn of the spiral, we must realize that not everything in our life right now can come with us.  If we are to succeed in our own becoming, we must be willing to release, to cut away from, to burn anything that is unlike that which we are choosing.  This is the hard but necessary part of change.  What is your vision for yourself?  What do you need to release, cut away from, burn, in order to support the manifestation of that vision?