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Hold to the last…

I have always been interested in the battlefield stories from Gettysburg… So many decisions that were made for good and bad that had profound outcomes on the future of the country. 
The account of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine on Little Round Top is the one that has fascinated me. The left flank. He was ordered to Hold under all circumstances…to the last… 

Late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863, on a boulder-strewn hillside in southern Pennsylvania, Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain dashed headlong into history, leading his 20th Maine Regiment in perhaps the most famous counterattack of the Civil War. The regiment’s sudden, desperate bayonet charge blunted the Confederate assault on Little Round Top and has been credited with saving Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac, winning the Battle of Gettysburg and setting the South on a long, irreversible path to defeat. (Read more here https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/defense-little-round-top

It was the decision to charge that is stunning… as the author Andy Andrew’s says it the Colonel had to “do something”…

And that is my takeaway beyond the historical significance…to do something…when I am ready to give up…when I am under the barrage of self-pity because of un met expectations in life…Each small seemingly random decision is a step that has meaning and outcomes beyond what I can see…so in the second act …I hope to hold to the last…



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