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I was doing some reading this evening about the movie "The Longest Day." Chronicling the Allied invasion of June 6, 1944, the film is a mostly-accurate rendition of the German, French, and Allied activities surrounding the D-Day invasion that spurred the end to the war in Europe.

Robert Mitchum plays the general Norman Cota, a general who helped motivate the troops to get off Omaha Beach and overcome German opposition. Prior to the D-Day invasion, Cota told his troops (according to Wikipedia):

". . . The little discrepancies that we tried to correct [in the amphibious training center] are going to be magnified and are going to give way to incidents that you might at first view as chaotic. The air and naval bombardment and the artillery support are reassuring. But you're going to find confusion. The landing craft aren't going in on schedule and people are going to be landed in the wrong place. Some won't be landed at all. The enemy will [to some degree prevent] our gaining "lodgement." But we must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads."

In this short statement, Cota told them of the realities of war; that in a battle, no battle plan survives the initial attack intact. Nothing ever goes totally according to plan, things go against you, timetables slip, or move up. Things change, and what matters is how we adapt, and move toward the goal.

And those words, given by a field commander to his troops, we learn one of the great lessons of living life: Things change; "we must improvise, carry on, [and] not lose our heads."

At the start of every battle plan, there is an objective, a task to be accomplished, a goal to be reached. The goal is clear, the task is certain, the objective is determined. Even if they have upsets, if a fighting force keeps moving toward the objective, adjusting as it goes, then more often than not, it will attain its goal.

In our own lives, most of us start by not knowing where we're going, not understanding what our objective is, not realizing what goals we wish to reach.

And most of us continue down that path for the rest of our lives. We accomplish little, because we've never set a plan and followed through with it.

We do not lose our way when we have a goal to shoot for. When we retain sight of that which we want, we are more likely to gain it.

Copyright, 2010, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.