TO HAVE A FRIEND YOU MUST BE A FRIEND STARTING WITH YOURSELF

No greater taboo exists than against being our own best friend.  Instead of cultivating loyalty, trust and belief in ourselves, we put the interests of others before our own, trust experts rather than our experience, and look for heroes to worship rather than celebrate our own lives. 

Popular culture espouses the importance of self-knowledge, but promotes self-indulgence.  Self-help books feed this indulgence by the subtle ploy of inferring self-improvement comes at the expense of self-acceptance.  This rejection feeds rather than alleviates self-doubt.  Therefore, the more self-conscious we are the less real we are to ourselves leading to a desperate search for self by avoiding personal self-responsibility. 

Ask yourself this question: do you know anyone obsessed with self-improvement that actually changes at all? 

When we hit a bump in the road, when things go awry in our personal or professional life, there is an army of friends and acquaintances that know what the problem is, know how to solve it, or know the right person for us to consult to make matters right. 

We listen, moved by the attention, and we might even pursue the advice, unhappily, seldom with satisfying results.  This is not because the advice is bad or that our advisers have devious motives.  More likely, the advice is a projection of their own demons and how they are attempting to wrestle with them, demons that simply aren’t our demons because we are not that other person. 

Even professionals in the counseling business can get lazy and assume that our situation is exactly like several others that they have handled.  Television psychologists, for example, who make an instant analysis of a person’s situation on limited data in the course of an hour’s broadcast are more a danger to that person, and by extension, the viewing audience then could ever be quantified. 

This is not meant to preclude the importance of an examined life for without such an examination life is not worth living.  It is arguing that the issues, the problems, the trauma, the perturbations, the embarrassments, the guilt, the anger, the doubt, the confusion, and the fear are in the individual’s labyrinth in the recesses of the mind, sacred topography.  If any of this is getting in the way of that individual, there must be an assertive effort to bring out in the open. 

One of the amazing miracles of life is that once these demons leave the hidden confines of our acquired self, our personality, into the light of day, they never seem as intimidating as they do in the recesses of our psyche. 

We have all heard the expression, “You are your own worst enemy.”  A friend or someone who thinks they know us better than we know ourselves likely suffers from the same dilemma.  Our culture teaches us to be self-haters, that is, to despise in ourselves what are the normal emotions and inclinations of a fully human being.  We are imperfect but perfectible, but not by running from what are or purporting to be what we are not.  Tolerance is not born of magnanimous acceptance of others nor is it gratuitous love of an ego ideal.  Tolerance is born of self-acceptance because what we most detest in others is what we first detest in ourselves.  If we can develop the ability to accept ourselves as we are, warts and all, chances are we will accept others as we find them. 

Love of others is a gift we give once we have first developed the ability to love ourselves.  It doesn’t work in reverse of this as much as society would preach to us that it does.  Nor is there the ideal job, vocation or profession that assures our work become love made visible.  It is what we give of ourselves, how we identify with what that is, that the love of doing becomes equally a love of being. 

There is no monetary equivalent that guarantees this satisfaction, this happiness; no level of education or intellectual enlightenment, no status or credentials that can make work and life love made visible.  Love is the product of when the worker and the work become one, indivisible with no separation into parts. 

In the past, work drove deeds, now deeds drive work.  We are in the information age, an electronic age that connects us abstractedly to ourselves as well as each other.  Our bodies and minds float across invisible circuits that have reduced us to sound bytes and pixels, making the First Industrial Revolution of assembly line alienation nothing compared to what is now happening in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Complexity has become scary because it threatens our control.  Like running from our problems, it now find ourselves in a state of panic denying what we cannot control.  We can’t sit still.  We can’t handle quiet.  We must have noise.  We must have some device in our hands texting or talking, or checking.  We must be busy.  We have our metaphorical foot on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere.  We are not happy campers.  We have lost our moral compass. 

Chaos is the new order, which has led to massive lay-offs, plant closings, shifting work requirements and deteriorating personal relationships.  We have turned to conspicuous consumption as therapy for our anxious age. 

Too often we have an undeclared war with ourselves. Two realities exist simultaneously.  Everything is precisely as it seems, and exactly the opposite.  Contradictions are something to embrace not avoid.  Contradictions are the grist for the mill of reality.  Nothing is either/or but either and or.  Popular culture promotes simplicity when we are being buried by complexity.   

It would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.  We show a different face to different people, and still a different face to ourselves.  It is in this duplicity that self-hatred dwells.  As much as we may think we loathe others (some pursue loathing as a career) nothing compares to self-loathing. Conversely, we are the chief benefactors of kindness shown. 

Words are meaningless when they fail to aid us in accepting ourselves as we are and others as we find them.   Money is not the root of all evil, the illusion of money is.  We think if I have enough money:

• No one can hurt me
• I will have security
• I need never to be alone, never grow old
• I need never be afraid, never worry

The paradox is that people with too little or too much money invariably have similar problems.  Next to money is the equal quandary over what is called “time.” 

Time, chronological time, is made an enemy to conquer when that is impossible.  We have a drive to one day “become happy” when happiness is a state of mind, not a destination.  We postpone enjoying life until we can retire but find when we do retire we can think only of work, which lives on in our minds. 

Psychological time relates to now, what you are doing now, not what you did, or are planning to do in the future. 

If you are watching too much television, it now time that you should watch less.  If you are addicted to your iPad or iPhone, it is now time that you set them aside, not later.  Being reminded that time is flying reveals the mind is dead to its own longings.  To change a habit or behavior has little to do with chronological time but everything to do with psychological time.  That is why smokers who quit cold turkey are less likely to resume smoking than those that use a patch or quit one-step-at-a-time. 

Subliminal stimuli bombard our subconscious throughout the day with artificial wants that we translate into legitimate needs.  There is a good chance we are playing out someone else’s agenda as most of us dress and behave alike, reacting in a consistent norm to the subliminal stimuli. 

Were we only to pause a moment we would realize we come into the world alone and we leave the world alone.  What transpires between the coming and the going is our own individual affair as we are in the constant company of ourselves. 

It is well to remember:

We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts.  Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one with but one actor on stage.  The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. 

Life is not a journey absent of struggle, pain, fear, disappointment or discouragement.  Should we embrace life and its challenges, we escape the prison of mind, and the cage of a borrowed agenda.  We are not completely free, but we have made friends with the most important person in our life, ourselves. 

With that in mind, let us now journey through this crazy age that is the home of our minds.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 9, 2012