(I rarely share my ideas and only with a small circle. I’m going to branch out a little and see what happens.)
One of the great lessons of my manhood has been to accept total responsibility for my life; I cannot be a light to the world if I am following someone else’s directions.
My efforts lately have been directed toward learning to do things for myself. I give and receive help in many ways and always appreciate it. However, the more I can do myself is the less dependent I am on others, and therefore on outside factors. I cannot be a light to the world to someone if I am under an obligation to them. (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”)
Naturally, I stumble, and it hurts, and I still avoid necessary steps because some days I don’t want to feel the pain. But pain is temporary, pain heals, pain makes you stronger (hell, the whole point of yoga is embracing the pain and learning to breathe through it), and the things you learn and the memories and the skills last a lifetime. (We hurt ourselves all the time. The key is to learn and grow from the pain.)
Again, I cannot be a light to the world if I can’t do things well, or if I hesitate to do things because I perceive my lack of skill or experience. Skill is gained through taking your licks. Experience is gained through experience. (In short: Do what is right, even if you think you can’t do it well. If you didn’t take yourself so seriously, you wouldn’t care about being perfect, and nobody else would, either.)
“What is right”? What’s that? Well, if you know and love yourself, and can see the world as yourself, then you know the right thing to do. If you trust yourself to act on that knowledge, you will do right.
The credo I fashioned on my first trip in lysergic bliss:
Know yourself.
Love yourself.
Trust yourself.
“Know yourself” I stole from Socrates, then added the rest. Speaking of standing on the shoulders of giants, here are two more quotes that may help:
“See the world as yourself.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as yourself,
Then you can care for all things.”
-The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 27 (Stephen Mitchell translation)
“Love thy neighbor as yourself.”
-Jesus of Nazareth, probably
You can’t truly love something until you know it– so know thyself. If you truly loved yourself, it would stand to reason that you would do unfailingly good and right by yourself. If you saw the world as yourself, felt the connection between you and the rest of humanity, nature, life, the whole wild outer space, the big heartbeat that keeps pumping us all on this adventure… well, how could you not love the world? How could you not do right by it? How could there be a difference between doing right by yourself and the world? (Hint: if there is, you’re doing it wrong.)
I am learning bit by bit to better give of myself to others. I am happiest this way and it opens up worlds. I frequently fear their judgment, but really, that fear is only an excuse to judge myself, which takes me out of the moment and clouds my actions. I’m facing it. Conquering it has been more difficult than I imagined.
But I love the people in my life and opening up to them has, indeed, opened up worlds and brought me places and made my life richer than I thought it could ever possibly be.
