Yes, Mardi often writes very long letters and emails!
And as for my assertion that my life is essentially unsuccessful, you really do have to accept standard methods of measuring success. It has to be one or more of the following :
1) the quantity of people affected by your work or personality – the greater the number the greater the success
2) the quality of people impressed by your work or personality – the higher the level of expertise of the persons doing the evaluation the higher the success
3) the amount of money, recognition, or power achieved by your work or personality – the greater the financial, acknowledgement or power achievements, the greater the success.
4) the number of things which you attempt to do, which you actually do.
So you really can’t honestly place the achievements of my life anywhere near the top end of any of those measures of success. But if that isn’t a problem for me it shouldn’t be for anyone else. In fact you should be really grateful to the Lord that He has given you the privilege of having a member of your immediate family be given a non-successful life trajectory. There are things which can only be learned from that perspective, truly valuable and meaningful things which cannot be perceived from the perspective of the successful life trajectory. By being included in my life, there are things that you can learn that you could never learn from your success-intensive life style!
Each person is given certain things in their life in order to learn some unique and individual aspect of the True Reality, not the perceived reality of our cultural environment. Learning that particular thing your life has been designed to teach is the purpose of every person’s individual life. And as each of us spends a life-time learning that one thing we have been given the advantages to learn, all of us – as a culture and as humanity – move forward toward our corporate goal.
Now you say, but what has all of that got to do with God’s plan for us. Well there is one overall general plan he has for everyone – to turn from ourselves and surrender to Him and to begin the journey with Him and for Him and to Him. However within the context of that universal plan there is a unique individual set of gifts given to each person. And those gifts include the disappointments, the pain and the difficulties of life as well as the blessings. Our weaknesses are as much a gift from the Lord as our strengths; our failures are as much a gift as our successes. And the purpose of all of it is to teach us something special and unique; and through us to bless the wider communities of which we are a part.
Success has no intrinsic value in itself as such. The experience of failure and success can both have value if you begin to learn from them. And by that I do not mean that we learn from our failures how to avoid failure in the future or from our successes how to increase them in the future. That whole business of putting a value on success as something to attain and a negative value on failure as something to avoid is totally illusory. Are you believing me yet? Failure has taught me the absolute illusion of the idea that success has value. It has freed me from the dominating tyranny of the need to succeed. So failure has a lot more value to me than success.
Why don’t you see what Buck Hatch [Christian psychology professor at my alma mater] thinks of this theory! I’ll bet he likes it! But you’ve got to present it as I have and not your personal bias on what I’ve said!
And as for my argument that art is a skill that anyone can learn. If you came to stay with me for one month and took lessons from me for 6 hours a day (2 three-hour sessions a day) and practiced in the hours remaining, I could have you drawing as well as me. I’m really not that good compared to the average working artist in America today. I’m at the low end of mediocre. That’s not a problem though. I was a bit discouraged when I first began to honestly appraise my work on a number of levels and had to admit this about it. But now that I’m inculcating my own philosophical perspective of the uselessness of success, I’m a lot more comfortable with honest appraisals of my work and my life that don’t turn out so attractively.
You can think about my theory and send me your rebuttal when you’ve got it all worked out. But you have to have a workable theory that pertains to anyone – like mine did. You can’t just say you don’t see my life in that light and try to prove how my life doesn’t fit that pattern. You’ve got to come up with an alternate theory of all of life that applies to anyone and addresses all those issues and resolves them with your theory!
Mardi’s letter to me continued:
I began to think of life as a school in which each person who is born is given a unique curriculum especially designed just for them. It includes many gifts that will give pleasure and gifts that will give pain. There will be things to strengthen and things to challenge. There will be things that seem to help and things that seem to block us. But the purpose of everything is not to become or to achieve or to acquire any of the things we end up using our lives to become, achieve and acquire. They are all given to us in order to teach us something more, greater, something of Real value.
People who are successful have been given a curriculum that includes success in the things they attempt. But the purpose is for them to learn something through the experiences of success. They cannot take credit for their success. It was given to them. What counts is whether they learn that thing of Real value that success was given to them to learn.
And non-success can be given to others for the same reason, to learn something Real that only the experience of non-success can teach. That thing is the real purpose of the experience – the real purpose of all the experiences of our life.
Everyone seems to think that success is not only a thing of great value, but it is perhaps the thing of greatest value in life. In fact it appears to be such an absolute necessity that everyone gets very upset when I assert that I am unsuccessful and they try to come up with a definition of successful that will allow me to be included. They don’t seem to understand when I try to explain that success really isn’t valuable. We don’t need it. We can live very happily without it!
But how does this relate to your pursuit of your own dreams. Well, when I came up with this theory I decided it wasn’t so important that I figure out how to overcome my non-success and achieve the great American dream of success. I thought perhaps it was more important to sit back and thoughtfully evaluate the experiences of my life so far. I think you need to be at least in your mid-30’s before you have enough life experiences to begin to recognize your individual pattern. It seemed clear that for whatever reasons, my life was being exemplified by large amounts of non-success. So instead of fighting a pointless battle to achieve a dubious goal, I decided to accept my gift of non-success and begin to try to explore it’s potential for leading me into an even deeper spiritual awareness.
So perhaps for you, you might want to take a look at your life and see what degree of success you can expect given your track record so far! I like to call it a success ratio. It’s a ratio of the percentage of our efforts that have been successful as compared to those that have not been. If you’re having only a moderate success ratio, or a low success ratio in the various areas of your life, then perhaps you won’t want to pursue the more elaborate and intense version of your dreams. You might want to scale down your expectations and re-think your dream in terms of what you might be able to achieve.
I don’t know if you like that idea. I can hear the high-power achievers calling it “defeatist”. But is it defeatist for a guy who is 5ft.2 to decide that maybe he should try to be a jockey instead of spending his life trying to get into the NBA? You could mention Muggsy Bouges. But in addition to being given a short body he was also given extraordinary skills, great speed, a consuming passion for the game of basketball and a high success ratio. In evaluating our potential in life we need to consider all our gifts, gifts of strength and gifts of weakness. If success is something that is given to us in order to learn something of greater value, isn’t it simply wisdom to accept our personal success ratio, learn how to live with it and learn from it.
Well, since we couldn’t finish our discussion on success ratio, I thought about it on the way home and polished up my argument a bit more. I realize that everyone is so uncomfortable with my ideas on success because our Reformation Protestant European work ethic perspectives have equated success with our personal value, our meaning in life and our fulfillment as persons. We think we must have success to have value, meaning and fulfillment. In fact none of these are actually connected to success and most other periods of history and other cultures understand this much better than the average American who has put them all in the same computer file.
So to say I am not successful – and probably never will be – does not mean that my life has no value. My life derives its value from the fact that I am made in the image of God. Every life has the same value. No life, however successful, has any more value than another, no matter how desperate a failure. The value of each life is, incredibly, as valuable to God as His own life! If I am feeling devalued or being treated as of no value by those who have misunderstood the nature of the value of life, I have only to meditate on the true value of my life. Value is not something you can be more or less successful at. It’s not in the same category as things which can be rated as successful or not.
Lack of success also does not mean that my life has no meaning. My life has been given meaning, a purpose and a goal by Jesus who came to show us God and to make a way for us to return to God who is our only true Love and only true Home. And he made himself the way, so that we have not just a sure pathway but a loving companion. That is all the meaning any life could need – to walk with God, through God, in God, to God. And once again that is not something I can be successful at, it is simply something that has been given to me and I enter into the gift.
And fulfillment in life cannot be attached to success either. That which produces fulfillment in life is love – giving love and receiving love. Love is something that comes out of your heart, it’s not an accomplishment which can be achieved in varying degrees of success. It is like your breathing – you breathe in the love of others and you breathe out love to others. And the ultimate source of all the love we have to receive and give is God from whom we come and to whom we are returning through Jesus.
Success not only does not produce value, meaning or fulfillment, it also cannot affect these things. They are totally independent of success. The imaginary value of success in our culture is purely illusory. It has no real value at all. And yet people assume it holds the very key to a valuable, meaningful, fulfilled life. This illusion is so pervasive that even Christians get uncomfortable when I assert that my life is essentially unsuccessful. They do not want to listen to my happy acceptance of this assessment.
I may be ready to share what has been tormenting me for the last two weeks. I don’t know. When I share my fears with others before I am ready, I increase my fears, but sharing my fears with others is also a big step toward releasing my fears. So I guess I will find out how posting this will affect me.
As I climbed from our car after our accident on the 4th, I was still in shock and not thinking too clearly, but I did consider whether I should stand the pylons back up which we knocked down. I decided that I didn’t know where they should be placed, so regretfully would let the owner put them back (it was a commercial lot, and no one was there). The next morning I called our insurance company and filled out a report online. Some hours later a cop came to my door asking about the damage to my car. I told him the story. He said, “You know you should have completed a police report?” I responded, “I thought that if the damage is under a certain amount, that was unnecessary.” “That may be the case,” he answered, “but whenever there is property damage, a report should be filed.” I said, “I didn’t think there was any property damage.” I called the property owner right away to apologize and called my insurance agency to report the additional claims of damage.
The upshot of it was that the trooper not only gave me a traffic ticket, but charged me with hit and run, a criminal offense (though it is a misdemeanor rather than a felony). I never could have imagined something like this happening to me. I’m a criminal. And in my current tenuous job situation I find myself, that is a pretty big mark against me if I need to find a job in the future, especially in the helping field. I have a hearing July 28, and the trial will probably be set for September. It has sent me for a huge tailspin emotionally.
Every time I hear a car door close or footsteps outside the house, every time my phone rings, every time I get in the car, my heart jumps with the fear, “The cops are after me!” I want to catch my breath or run and hide or curl into a protective ball. This fear of impending doom is constantly twanging its chaotic tune around each daily event, and though I can soothe myself into a surface calm by focusing on the truth of God’s compassion and care, I know the least prick will bring it back full force.
The fear is much bigger than just the potential for the trial’s outcome. Now that my life has crossed the line of the inconceivable, all future disastrous possibilities have opened before me. It is a fear that I might at any moment, without warning, be hit by some major loss, something that tears a deep gash in my sense of worth because it was my fault… I could be fired, I could lose my house, with the best intentions I could step on a hundred legal landmines, and my apparent innocence would be meaningless. I have this constant feeling, “What am I doing wrong? What might happen next?” Now that the unthinkable has happened, every catastrophe seems possible, and I have no way of protecting myself. I know the fear will decrease with time, as it has a bit already. But that doesn’t change my experience of today and tomorrow.
My sister Mardi is a visual artist in multiple media as well as a poet. I love her work. And she thinks deeply like I do. This is the first part of a letter she sent to me while I was struggling with my own sense of failure in India.
What is success, really? And why do we value it? Does it have any actual value in itself? It can have many meanings for many different people, it could have to do with how much money a person or project earns, how much recognition it receives, how many people it influences. In simpler terms, for those of us who have a vision, a dream, a goal we are trying to achieve, success could mean simply achieving that. But in our economically driven society there is another aspect of it: that we would like our dream to support itself (at least) and also support us (if that’s possible).
We have the dream, we plan a strategy for reaching it and we begin investing our life in it’s accomplishment. We give our time, our thought, our energy, our money. And the dream grows and expands and becomes more complex and elaborate. But how do we measure the success? By the first criteria – achieving the dream, or by the second – supporting itself and us? What if we can be successful with the first and not the second? What if, for all our efforts we can be successful with neither?
My life has been an experience in non-success. I am intimately familiar with all the various ways to be unsuccessful in all its nuances. So I have learned a number of ways of dealing with this without giving up the dream. And I have developed a philosophy about the nature and purpose of success itself.
When we are trying to achieve our dream one of the first things we can do is recognize when it seems that the original plan is not working. We try to re-evaluate the situation. Adjust our goals. Modify our expectations to something that seems perhaps more achievable given our resources and limitations.
Mardi Woodblock Print: Seagull
In my life, after years of trying to sell my work, promote my work, create work that would be popular, I realized I was not going to get a large response to my work. But there were people who loved it and always responded enthusiastically to anything I created. They were few enough and poor enough that they couldn’t have supported me for a week if they all got together! But the spiritual support and encouragement they gave me was invaluable. So I began to create just for this limited audience, with hopes that eventually my work would achieve a wider success. Since these people couldn’t afford to buy work, I give it away as Christmas gifts. Occasionally some one who has contacts loves my work and I have a brief experience of selling. But even in very good years I’ve never made $1000 and when you take out the expenses for materials I’ve always lost money. Some years, with great effort, I just lost less. By any standard you’d like to use I am unsuccessful.
I began thinking in recent years about the whole nature of success. Some people think that success is the result of hard work, skills in some area or a combination of the two. But I knew many people who worked very hard and could never reach that place where they could be considered successful. I also knew people with great talent, skill and ability, people with magnificent vision and insight. Yet they were completely unsuccessful. At the same time there were those who were neither hard working, skilled, nor wise who were achieving success in numerous ways: receiving recognition and honors, making money, achieving the goals they set for themselves, doing the things they loved, enjoying the things they did.
In my own life I was exhibiting in local and regional art exhibits with hundreds of other artists. But because I was in the category of printmaking I was actually competing against only 2 or three other people usually. The odds for me winning awards should have been very good. Yet year after year I never won any awards, even when I created very complex, very large works. I felt my work was much better than many of the pieces that won – but then what artist doesn’t feel that!?
What struck me however was that it was repeated year after year with all sorts of different judges and different shows, and different other artists. The sheer volume of the rejection was becoming compelling. It seemed that the ones who won the awards were also people who seemed to be successful in many other areas of their life as well, financially, career achievements and all that.
So I began to think that perhaps success was not something that we achieved at all, either by effort or by skill or by insight. What if success is simply something that has been given to us, one of the criteria of our life, like our family, our intelligence, our size, etc. What if it is not an end or a goal at all but merely one of the many things through which we can learn those things that have Real value?
I began to think of life as a school in which each person who is born is given a unique curriculum especially designed just for them. It includes many gifts that will give pleasure and gifts that will give pain. There will be things to strengthen and things to challenge. There will be things that seem to help and things that seem to block us. But the purpose of everything is not to become or to achieve or to acquire any of the things we end up using our lives to become, achieve and acquire. They are all given to us in order to teach us something more, greater, something of Real value.
Mardi Woodblock Print: Butterfly
Our accident brought some of my handicaps into the spotlight. First of all, I am not a multitasker in any sense of the word. I do very well concentrating on one task, but if a second is added, one of them will get seriously neglected. Furthermore, I get trapped in the mazes of my own brain. If I am reflecting deeply (which is mostly the only kind I do), I better be engaged in a physical task that can be accomplished on auto-pilot. My problem is not drinking and driving, but thinking and driving. I’m being quite serious.
I can’t turn off my brain unless the activity I am involved in requires my complete mental attention (such as taking a test). I have often come close to stuttering to the roadside on empty because I can only force myself to think, “Stop for gas!” for about 30 seconds before I am off in some other world. On the way to the lake last week, my wife suddenly asked me if I had taken the right exit… I couldn’t remember.
I guess this has been a problem for some time, since Kimberly tells me that when we first met, I drove straight through a red light without realizing it… I don’t remember. The one area where it has come out most prominently in my driving is failing to notice things ahead that require me to slow down or stop. I do fairly well on my own, though it regularly calls for an uncomfortably quick stop, but when I get further engrossed by conversing with Kimberly, I am downright dangerous. Many times Kimberly has had to warn me of things up ahead which I am approaching too quickly.
The accident forced me to realize that it is not enough for me to try harder to concentrate on driving, but I really have to take a serious action step. I haven’t talked to Kimberly about it yet, but I think when we are driving in traffic together, she needs to be behind the wheel. I usually drive because she prefers not to. Also, as I told her on the way back from our accident, “I’m only 50, but I’m going to have to start driving like a geezer.”
A second serious handicap of mine is that I don’t notice the need for a change (in practical matters) unless I am forced to see it. I will be semi-conscious of a problem, but will keep performing the same old routines without ever consciously making a decision to do so. It niggles somewhere on the outskirts of my mind, and may take a very long time, sometimes too long, to burrow up to the level of conscious deliberation. I “should” have realized this driving issue as a real problem and looked for a solution long ago. We knew it was a problem, but it never occurred to me to make a significant change… I just kept trying to do better using the failing system.
I’m not beating up on myself. I put “should” in quotation marks because I don’t really think it was negligence on my part; it is part of who I am. We all have handicaps, and we do well to recognize them. God not only gave us all strengths, but he deliberately created us with weaknesses as well. I think this was his way of making us interdependent, of tying us together in community. Our weaknesses are not “bad” things, they are just part of who we are and who we will always be. I may be able to improve or compensate for my weaknesses, but if I try to quash them or force them into conformity, I am being false to the way God created me. I have believed this very late in life and have suffered a great deal for not recognizing it earlier, but that must wait for another post. As L’Arche says, the world is not divided into those with handicaps and those without; we are all disabled and badly in need of the gifts of others.
I love the picture of our interdependence expressed in this poem, though our need for others can also be a frightening thought.
Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
For some there are more pieces.
For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.
Some seem to be born with a nearly complete puzzle.
And so it goes.
Souls going this way and that
Trying to assemble the myriad parts.
But know this. No one has within themselves
All the pieces to their puzzle . . .
Everyone carries with them at least one and probably
Many pieces to someone else’s puzzle.
Sometimes they know it.
Sometimes they don’t.
And when you present your piece…
To another, whether you know it or not,
Whether they know it or not,
You are a messenger from the Most High.
–Lawrence Kushner, Honey from the Rock
July 4th Kimberly and I visited her Aunt Pam on the lake. It had been a nice day, but started to rain an hour before we left. As we drove home on a two lane road, I came around a curve and spotted a car stopped in front of me with a car passing it in the oncoming lane. Because of the rain, I knew I could never brake in time, but there was no shoulder. I swerved onto the sloped wet grass and the tires slid uncontrollably down the embankment into a row of spaced wooden pylons at the bottom. Bump! …Bump! …Bump! …Bump!
Thankfully, the window-high logs were not buried or cemented in the ground, so each one went down successively and did what my brakes could not. We ended up just short of a side street, gently enough that the airbags did not deploy. It was a close call. The plastic front bumper was torn badly and we had a big dent in the fender, but after I strapped up the broken bumper with 3 bungee cords, we managed to drive home okay, though we were both shaken up.
When anything bad happens, especially with a potential repeat, the “if” question starts flashing like a warning light. If I had been more alert, I may have been able to stop in time… if my tire treads were better… if I had been driving slower… if Kimberly had been driving. Identifying the crucial “if” and finding its answer seems to be our voucher to a safe future, especially for us fix-it types.
For those of us who are also shame sponges, our very worth seems to ride on these answers. The “if” must not point to me. I must prove that I could not have foreseen or planned or reacted any better than I did, even when it means, sadly, that I find someone else to blame. When I’m unarguably at fault, then a second defense to my worth is to fix the results, make sure there is no cost to anyone but myself. When this also is beyond my reach, then a weak third defense is to settle on a solution that will prevent this incident ever recurring.
Unfortunately, these three steps of unhealthy self-protection can look very spiritually mature, even to myself. I can pass it off as self-examination, restitution, and repentance. I think I am fleeing from shame into rectitude, but I am actually running from true forgiveness and grace into the apparent safety of legalism. I cannot believe that there is complete forgiveness and reconciliation without some payment from my side… a payment of promises, of sorrow and groveling, or of corrective action. The smaller my failure footprint, the easier it is to forgive me… at least that is what I picked up from interacting with fellow humans.
Once thoroughly trained in this relational dynamic, it is very hard for me to change the way I see God. Unlike us, he never finds it hard to forgive me and isn’t suspicious that my confession is contrived. He never lets the injury I have done him constrict his compassion for me or his desire to relate to me. I should not have said “never lets” as though his forgiveness was an act of his will to override his natural inclinations to retaliate. His love for me is always on full, regardless of what I have done.
In a message to a friend I wrote the following some time back. I would love to get everyone’s thoughts, to get a dialogue going. Are you game?
When I said that different folks are helped in different ways (and by different kinds of people), I meant that even the downcast are each sad in his or her own way, with unique history, issues, perspectives, coping strategies, resources and the like. When I was struggling in Calcutta with deep depression, a well-wisher sent me a copy of “Spiritual Depression” by a noted evangelical writer. The author’s premise was that depression always arises from a lack of faith. I have discovered in my own life that depression and sadness may be a demonstration of a much deeper faith. Many people are too afraid (i.e. lack the faith) to allow themselves any unpleasant feelings. They constantly keep such feelings at bay by various means of escape (entertainment, overwork, even reading the Bible). It often takes a great deal of courage (i.e. faith) to acknowledge one’s unpleasant feelings, and if we push those feelings away, we will never discover what they are trying to tell us about ourselves.
So many folks are also afraid that not challenging their friend’s moodiness will encourage him either to mope and cling to his depression (a “pity party”) or to use his depression to manipulate others. These two unhealthy responses do occur. On the one hand, no one is completely honest, even with themselves, about their feelings. So some folks use depression to avoid their true feelings because of fear of acknowledging their anger or sadness or pain (just as other folks use cheerfulness to avoid their genuine emotions). On the other hand, they may use their depression to try to control others. The solution for both types of folks is not to push them out of feeling sad, however, but to help them discover their true feelings beneath their depression while maintaining good boundaries relationally and emotionally (i.e. not yielding to manipulation).
Some folks want you to cheer them up from their sadness, either because they are not ready to face their deep unpleasant feelings or because their sadness is superficial and probably only circumstantial. (After all, no one likes to feel depressed—everyone would rather always be genuinely cheerful if it came with no negative side effects.) They may in fact need “cheering up,” though in my perspective even these folks are usually more benefited by an expression of sympathy for their sadness, at least initially and tentatively: an offer to be with them in their pain, if they wish, instead of helping them to avoid it.
After writing about my “Aha” moment, I found it was not such a new discovery after all, because I journaled about it months ago. It was something I had started to learn and then forgot. In the past I would have judged myself for this “neglect of the truth,” but I’ve discovered that this is how I learn… with fits and starts, do-overs and false leads. Here is my entry, a more insightful “Aha” about forced compliance (slightly edited to make sense to others):
I realize why I have been feeling increasingly depressed, and it is a long term, pervasive problem. Although it involves performance, it is not tied to “should” or “well done” (big issues for me). It is rather anchored by a sheer “must,” tasks about which I feel I have no choice. Although obligation may also be part of the driving force, it is not uppermost—failure to do what should be done results in guilt and shame, but failure to do what must be done results in anxiety. It is a direct appeal to the will rather than the conscience.
In childhood when my parents told me to do something “Now!” in sharp anger, I reacted out of sheer compulsion. I responded quickly in fear—well, not in conscious fear, since the idea of disobedience was too remote to have the consequences of that even occur to me. It was a stronger and quicker motivator to compliance than an appeal to obligation or shame. It completely bypassed my ability to think regarding the matter and was reflexive, like jerking the steering wheel to avoid a collision. There is no consciousness of fear in such a situation—it is first react, and then feel—and if the danger and escape are both over in a flash, there may not even be an aftershock of fear, perhaps not even of relief.
Whenever authority figures take charge with an obvious and absolute expectation of compliance, I feel I have no choice. The thing must be done without a single additional consideration. Only in the case where the demand was to break a clear moral standard did I stop to consider and refuse, but this was simply because there was a higher authority still, namely God, the one of whom I was most afraid. “Because I said so” was a common enough reason offered by mom to insist on obedience regardless of how we felt, what we wanted, or what opposing reasons we offered.
When an absolute is imposed on the will, the damage to self worth does not come through a sense of shame, but through a sense that someone else’s will and wish has priority over mine, that I am more or less a cog in the wheel of the accomplishment of their objectives. It is the worth-denying position of a slave. It is very depersonalizing to know that one’s feelings do not matter, and that is the real crux of the situation. If something really must be done and I must do it out of personal necessity (in other words, I don’t want to suffer the consequences of it not being done) and I am acting out of that motivation, it does not feel as though my feelings are being scorned.
But naturally the same action can spring from different motivations, so I can perform the act out of a sense of powerlessness and disrespect leveraged against me, or out of my sense of what is best for my own needs. Even if the pressure is there from an authority figure, or from someone whose opinion or valuation of me I feel a need, I can still learn to respond out of a different motivation, a motivation that validates my own feelings and chooses based on what is best for myself. Of course, keeping that person’s good will or affection may seem paramount to me, but then the two different motivations appear to coalesce, and I am not free. In such a situation I need to ponder the next lower level in my psyche—the co-dependence I am feeling—and work through that issue until I am free enough to respond without undermining my self worth.
The key for me is to bring these dynamics to consciousness and then try to support and affirm my desires and fears. I think there are many ways I can do this. I can adjust the time frame, the means to the goal, the goal itself, and in other ways try to accommodate my distresses and desires, but I especially need to work on understanding and redirecting the motivation out of which I choose and act. I must always stop to understand what I am feeling and why, to validate and affirm those feelings, to allow myself the human right of choice, and to choose and act from this affirmation of myself. It does not mean I will refuse to act in the best interest of others. My soul needs its true feelings affirmed, not necessarily fulfilled in that moment. I believe affirming my own longings is a cornerstone of self-care, not selfishness.
In case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m a very screwed up person. More screwed up than most others? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. More aware of my own issues than most others are of theirs?… I’d be willing to bet on that. It makes for a sense of isolation and loneliness. I am eternally grateful for my wife. The two of us make a great community.
Janathan Grace Reflections 