Acting with certainty bends reality. When you are truly decided, you stop negotiating with your own fear. You act, and the world begins to respond. Certainty isn’t a mood. It’s a choice you keep honoring, even when you don’t feel ready.

That’s one reason why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the celebration of his life matter. People retell his story as if it were destined to happen, but in his time, it seemed far from destiny.

It’s easy to look at your current situation, compare it to where you’d like to be, recognize that it’s very far from your dreams, and then logically conclude that your dreams will never happen. When these thoughts occur, you’ve decided to believe your circumstances are too powerful to overcome, and you cannot move with certainty.

You may not have the financing, time, energy, support, education or connections. You might have children, parents and friends who need your help; you may have very little time for yourself.

Even so, human beings can overcome their circumstances when they move with certainty. We see this in the life of Dr. King, who maintained a clear vision of the future he wanted to see and moved resolutely toward it, as if he couldn’t fail.

His life proves that if you can see a vision of the future that you’d like to experience and move toward that vision with unwavering faith, you can make it so.

Even when your circumstances are overwhelming, even when the government is unjust and oppressive, you can rise above your circumstances and accomplish the impossible.

Dr. King saw a vision of the future so clearly, and he believed in it long enough to make the impossible possible.

His external reality was that he grew up when Blacks were openly considered inferior by the local, state and federal governments. His internal reality, his vision for the future, was quite the opposite.

He grew up in the Jim Crow era. When government laws, mainly in the South, openly mandated tyranny and hatred against Black people.

Dr. King once said, “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

Segregation, lynchings, church burnings, police brutality, attack dogs, powerful fire hoses spraying protesters to the ground, and citizens attending protests, holding disparaging signs, were the circumstances Dr. King was expected to rise above if he was to accomplish his dream.

Somewhere along the way, he decided to bend reality.

Dr. King came into the public eye when Rosa Parks famously refused to sit at the back of the bus. He came to her aid and helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days. During the boycott, Dr. King’s house was firebombed. This only strengthened his resolve.

King said, “It all boils down to the fact that we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied with unattained goals.”

Despite constant threats against his life and many telling him his dream was impossible, he knew and acted otherwise. The power of his vision and the certainty of his actions eventually convinced millions to join him in the Civil Rights Movement.

He went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize, help end Jim Crow, and witness the beginning of desegregation. Tragically, he was assassinated in 1968 at the young age of 39.

Becoming greater than your circumstances will always come with opposition, obstacles, much hard work, and in some cases, death.

He once said, “Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles; Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.”

His life is a testament to the fact that we can rise above our present circumstances and achieve the impossible.

Dr. King, who moved with certainty in an uncertain time, was able to rise above ignorant beliefs about skin color, tyrannical government laws, endure the constant threat of death and still accomplish his dream. If he was able to do that, despite overwhelming resistance against him and his movement, then what excuse do we have not to move toward our own goals with absolute certainty and bend our own reality in the process?

• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.