What is Your Life’s Blueprint?

This is a video of rarely seen footage of Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967, where he delivered his speech “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?”

His speech is geared for Junior High School students and school and future goals. However, I believe that school can also mean to always follow our dreams. Never give up! Also, I believe every morning is a new day of education for us. We just need to keep our eyes open too the newness and freshness of what opportunities this great big beautiful world holds in store for all of us. If you look hard there is always somethings new and valuable for us to learn and to teach others. Life is school. Keep learning and keep teaching.

Also, his speech of course is speaking during the Civil Rights Movement. I believe that mental illness stigma and stigma of any kind is “The Civil Rights Movement” of today and we all need to fight it and apply the power and beauty of his words to fight the stigma.

Please listen carefully to the incredible gift of his poetic words that can teach us all how to be strong, make a difference in our lives and the world, and to always love ourselves and others. His words are full of the most poetically elegant beauty and wisdom and will speak the truth of our lives on earth for eternity.

I listened to his speech many times and then wrote a narrative of it for you to read, as well.

What is in your life’s blueprint?

This is the most important and crucial period of your lives for what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well determine which way your life shall go.

You need a blueprint. A blueprint serves as the pattern and the guide and the model for those who are to build the building. A building is not well erected without a good, sound and solid blueprint.

Number one… in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in:

• your own dignity
• your own worth
• your own somebodyness

Don’t allow anybody to make you feel like you are nobody.

Always feel that you count.

Always feel that you have worth and… always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Number Two in your Life’s Blueprint is that you… must have a basic principle to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor.

What will you do in your life? What will your life’s work be?

Once you discover what your life’s work will be – do it well.

Doors of opportunity are opening for each of you. The great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter these doors as soon as they open.

Study hard. Don’t drop out of school. In spite  of your economic plight. In spite of your situation that you are forced to live in… stay in school.

When you discover what you are going to be and do in life set out to do it as if the God all mighty called you at this moment in time of history for you to do it…. set out to do that job so well that the living, the dead and the unborn could not do it any better.

If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill, be a scrub in the valley…

but be the best little scrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush, if you can’t be a tree.

If you can’t be a be a highway, just be a trail.

 If you cant be the sun, be a star.

For it isn’t by size that you win or you fail.

Be the best at whatever you are!

Finally, in Life’s Third Blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles of…

• beauty
• love
• justice

Do not allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them.

Don’t allow anybody to cause you to lose your self respect to the point that you do not struggle for justice.

However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live.

You have a responsibility to seek to make life a better life for everybody to live in.

So you must be involved in the struggle for freedom and justice.

There are many constructive things that we all can do and that we all must do.

So our slogan must not be… burn baby burn but it must be… build baby build. Our slogan must be… learn baby learn… so we that we can… earn baby earn.

With a powerful commitment, we can transform dark yesterdays of injustice into bright tomorrows of justice and humanity.

Let us keep going for the reality of understanding of good will, and the realization of the dream of brotherhood, and the dream of understanding of goodwill.

Let nobody stop us.

We must keep moving.

We must keep going.

If you cant fly, then run.

If you cant run, then walk.

If you can’t walk, then crawl,

but by all means…

keep moving.

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