Taking What’s Offered

Taking What’s Offered

Not everything has to be taken by force of will and pressure,
some of it is sitting in a clearing at your leisure,
and the discipline of knowing when to take the open passage
is as real a skill as breaking through the wall at every chapter.

Taking what is offered is not surrender to the easy,
it is reading the terrain and knowing when the path goes breezy,
a man who fights through every door when half of them stand open
has spent his energy on doors that could have been left unbroken.

I have seen the fighter miss the opportunity beside him
because he was too busy with the adversary outside him,
the offered territory sometimes comes as invitation
and turning down the gift is not a victory, it is abdication.

Last spring a contract came through channels I had not cultivated,
a reference from a decade back, a loyalty I had not anticipated,
I took it, built from it, and it became the access to a sector
I had been trying to crack for years through a far harder vector.

Taking what is offered means your antennae have to function,
means you recognize the opening at the unguarded junction,
the conqueror who only knows the frontal and the forceful
will miss the half of every map that does not need the courseful.