Blog 2349 – 03.30.2022

Our Highest And Best

For those ever striving to let their highest best self have preeminence today’s picture quote is great advice. Practice indeed helps us to perfect what we are good at and finding and perfecting what we are best at helps us to discover exactly Who and Whose we truly are.

Jack Nicholson’s character in the 1997 romantic comedy, As Good As It Gets, is a successful writer of romantic novels, but like many of us he is also a few sandwiches short of a picnic. When his lovely date threatens to leave him sitting alone at the seafood restaurant where they had waited in a long line to be seated unless he gives her a compliment, he says, “Remember those pills my psychiatrist wanted me to take and I refused, well, I started taking them, because you make me want to be a better man.” She replied, “That is the nicest thing that any man has ever said to me.” To which Jack, who just cannot leave well enough alone says, “Well, perhaps I over shot a bit. I was just trying to keep you from leaving the table.”

We are of all men and women most fortunate if we meet someone who wants us to be the highest and best version of ourselves and who helps us to want that as well. Anything less will not bring us happiness. The best and easiest way to know we are living the dream we were meant to live is to gauge our own happiness and the happiness we bring to others.

As a young man I tried very hard to be a Christian, reading the Bible over and over again in many versions searching for clues. I think I even found a few. One was a Moffatt translation of a verse in the New Testament, from one of John’s short letters that says, “I have no greater joy than to hear of my children living in the truth.” I have for some time now no longer believed that the Bible is the holy word of God in whole and in part, any more than any other book, or that being a Christian makes one better than anyone else. I have come to understand that verse to mean that the writer was saying that he had no greater joy than to hear that his children were being true to themselves – being as it were the best and highest version of themselves. What parent could ever want more or any individual for that matter?

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jeJWENi351fHPRsJkt1gfPG2qHleNKJe/view?usp=drivesdk

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