The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

Celebrate Life!

Don’t Sell Yourself Short!

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

© January 15, 2016

REFERENCE:

This is one of a series of essays that previously appeared in trade journals and periodicals.  It is to be a book for the Kindle Library titled, “A Way of Thinking About things.”

In our lives there is a point, sometimes several instances, when we are forced to look through a glass clearly.  What is surprising is that more often than not we look through a glass darkly.  This extends and worsens the pain.  We second guess ourselves and focus on the content of our life when the problem resides in our subtext.

We tend to listen to everyone but ourselves as subliminal messages bombard our subconscious.  If we would but listen, we would be in contact with ourselves and the habitual patterns that dog our existence.

We are seemingly on automatic pilot drifting in a sea of change ill equipped to change our course.

Our life has assumed a series of incremental frustrations moving us away from celebration.  Yet, our worse moments can lead to our best moments once we jolted out of our funk.

Take getting fired, made redundant, a romance gone sour, going through a divorce, or a sudden illness due to lifestyle excess.  Such situations can introduce us to our better self and release us from automatic pilot.  You realize:

·      There is nothing wrong with you that cannot be changed.

Friends think they know what is wrong or best for you: “You’re your own worst enemy,” “You need to hang out with a different crowd,” “You’re in the wrong job (relationship),” “It’s not your fault,” “It’s the economy (your boss, stress at home, on the job, the times),” “You need to take a break (leave your job, family, area) and get a new start.”  

In delicate or blunt language, they act as your guide with their ambulance chaser mentality.  Best you ignore their counsel and have a caring conversation with yourself.

You can change your personality.  You cannot change your essence.  You are born with your essence; you acquire your personality.  You can choose to change.

·      Don’t look to others for advice but extend that courtesy to yourself.

Listen to your own counsel without blinders.  So you screwed up, so someone asked your opinion and you gave it, and now that person is not speaking to you, so you’re not comfortable thinking in sound bites, so you suffer fools poorly, and stay clear of small talk, flatterers and spin.  So what?  Develop your own center and you will not lose your way.

·      Don’t take yourself too seriously.

When crises come, and they come to us all, don’t second guess yourself.  Go with your intuition, your gut intelligence.  Don’t belittle yourself, and don’t hang out with people who do.  Learn from experience.  Don’t deny blame when warranted.  Deal with it.  Nothing happens in a vacuum, and no one is guiltless in crisis.  Learn from the incident and move on.  Remember, we are imperfect but perfectible.

·      Forgive yourself for being human.

We all take false steps, do stupid things, and are not always on top of things.  Nor do we always know when to say “no,” when to go with the flow or when to resist it.  We occasionally take ourselves too seriously, but other times not seriously enough.

Let today be a day of celebration.  It is the only day you have for certain.  Don’t dwell on what you have lost but what you can gain.  Look for the bright sun beyond the dark clouds.  It is there.  It is always there.

·      Let your intuition speak to you.

We may mock our gut intelligence but at our peril.  We think with our whole body not only our minds.  We are an animal.  Like all animals we have the advantage of instinct as well as its complement in conscious intelligence.  Don’t belittle this.  Intuition may save your life.  It has saved mine.

It is speaking to you as you read this.  Are you listening?  If not, listen now!  Your intuition is privy to that quandary you’re wrestling with.  It has the answer.  Listen and heed its counsel.  The gut never lies!  It is our reptilian brain at work when we pray for guidance.    

·      Be your own best friend. 

To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.  It is your best friend if you would but allow it to be so.  Don’t look first for friendship elsewhere.  That will only make you more anxious.  Before you belong to others you must first belong to yourself.  It begins with an intimate conversation with yourself. 

Don’t seek justification through the accumulation of wealth, kudos, accolades, rewards or recognition.  Find contentment in being, not becoming.  Once you find comfort with yourself you will experience comfort with others.  Test yourself.  Spend an hour alone in silence allowing your mind to wander in wonderment, no cell phones, no music, only Nature nurturing your solace.

Don’t be misguided by words.  Words are not actions.  To say you “love yourself” is a word game and irrelevant.  If you must reduce the matter to words, consider “like.”  Like yourself and you will like others as you find them because “liking yourself” is another word for self-acceptance. 

Word games are the problem.  We say we love ourselves but don’t like ourselves very much.  That is because we judge ourselves too harshly. 

Look in the mirror and smile, “I’m all I’ve got, and I’m okay, a little frayed here and there, but totally worthwhile.” 

·      Give others the benefit of the doubt with this caveat.

So often we treat our life as if an accident.  A series of choices put us where we find ourselves.  Yes, we can blame others, and reap the satisfaction of that denial, but that doesn’t change our situation.  It wasn’t an act of God that put us here, it was an act of will. 

Our acquired self, our personality, is of our own construction.  This molded us into the person we are.  If you compare and compete, the secular religion of our society, chances are you are a collection of imitations. Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher explain this trend:

 Competition enslaves and degrades the mind.  It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence.  Eventually, if not overcome, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality and spontaneity.  He is humanly dead.  Competition produces zombies!  Nonentities!  (Beyond Success and Failure, 1971)

Yet, society decrees competition is essential to life.  We obediently follow its dictates from the time we enter school until we retire.  It is as if our corporate society fears originality.

If our mania is to copy others, we have little clue as to what floats our boat.  We are slaves to the mundane as humor has been reduced to a television canned laugh track and movie drama to filmed pyrotechnics.

In this funk, we dwell on what we don’t have and are not.  We are not educated enough, not rich enough, not well mannered enough, not handsome or pretty enough, not young enough, not socially acceptable enough.  As casualties of the Compare & Compete Syndrome, the demands of personality dominate at the expense of our essential uniqueness.   

·      Motivational Changes

No doubt life can find us unhappy campers and life a grind.  Everything is an effort.  Spontaneity is playing on another circuit.  Days are filled with woe: I should do this, I have to do that instead of, I want to do this, and I will do this!

We go from job to job with equal drudgery and wonder why.  It is because we carry our psychological baggage with us wherever we go.  This finds life like driving our automobile with the accelerator and brake on at once, burning up rubber and feeling we’re getting nowhere.  We are prisoners of the “Paralysis of the Will, captive to our own self-ignorance.  We are living the life we have constructed. 

·      Pay Attention to Your Uniqueness, to Your Essence.

This is your genetic code, the code of your soul, the chemistry of your being.  It is not “out there!”  It emanates from within.  It is the color of your eyes and hair, the shape of your body, and the slant of your mind.

Essence gets scant attention with the focus on becoming.  Acres of diamonds under foot are missed, as our eyes are on the horizon.    

Tap your essence and you unearth contentment.  No longer will you imitate others as you are too busy celebrating your individuality.  You are author of your footprints in the sand, hero of the novels written on your heart, on stage in a singular drama before an audience of one. 

We come into the world alone and leave alone.  In that span, if we make connection with ourselves, our life will scintillate with surprise, no longer be in bondage to boredom or loneliness for we have a new best friend, happily engaged in celebration.    

 Personal Excellence, June 2004