Blog 459 – 11.08.2016

And I am not talking about who will be the next President or your take on abortion, guns, emails, or locker room talk. We make many choices in our life but to me the most important choice is what we choose to believe about ourselves.

Do you believe you are an accident? Do you believe you are a body, a brain, the culminations of a series events beyond your control? The quality of your life experience depends in large part upon how you see yourself. For many years I held an image of myself at about nineteen years of age in the prime of life physically, open to all that life held for me, and uneffected as yet by some of the biggest disappointments in my life.

Often it is the big diappointments that we allow to shape the way we see ourselves. Many times we blame the actions or inactions of others or ourselves for this picture we paint in our minds of who we are. The famous book Portrait Of Dorian Grey uses the theme of a man who makes a sort of pact with evil that a painted image of him as a handsome and innocence young man will bear the marks of his misdeeds and not himself. He stays young and the figure in the picture becomes a wretched disfigured old man. I do not consider myself, wretched, disfigured, nor old really. I am not as young as I once was, definitely not nineteen, but I am more than my body, more than my brain, so much more than the sum total of what I have experienced in this life.

I am and you are “a magnificent being awakening to my highest potential.” I am a creature of light, of love, of joy, as are you. What we do does not change who we are but if we are pretending to be less than we are we are not experiencing our highest and best happiness. I did not say “more than we are” because that is an oft heard complaint that he or she is acting like they think they are better than they are. It is impossible to over estimate the worth of a single human soul. And yet historically we have all tried to do that concerning others and ourselves.

I see a lot of great truth in love songs. Elvis Presley sang a song called, The Wonder Of You. When we love someone we are able to see the highest and best in them. Actually not seeing them that way is a sure sign that we neither know them or love them and that includes that most difficult person to know and love, yours truly. And by that I mean “ourself.”

I no longer hold a vision of myself as a nineteen year old young man but that of a much older wiser being residing perhaps for the time being in an aging house but a glowing, loving, and joyful being nonetheless. What do you see when you look in the mirror? The choice is yours.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White