Good morning! Well, people are talking about it everywhere. After a year of the pandemic even the healthiest are struggling. In response to an increased level of need, I recently offered to shift the blog direction in whichever ways would help most.
The challenge is that many people prefer many different approaches, including the resolutions we were doing. Looking for what everyone’s needs had in common, it was obvious that everyone is trying to move from a quagmire of increasing meaninglessness and negativity, to anything more positive.
Since we can discuss positive things about the world, about other people in it, or about ourselves, why not start where we are? Hello reader.
Let’s start the week by reminding you that you are good person. That hopefully feels good to hear. But then your ego probably immediately ads a but…. Sure, I agree, you have consistent things about you people that people often don’t like. If your qualities are beneficial to people, other traits are not.
That can seem damning if we start from the bottom, with the idea that these are the things that keep making us unworthy. Then our qualities are reduced to striving attempts to make us acceptable. It’s like we’re trying to cleanse ourselves from some original sin we never committed.
If we assume that bottom-up view, then it’s us personally being rejected. But if we think of it from the top down, then perfection is an unattainable ideal at the summit of every life, and we’re just somewhere short of that perfection.
As a personal image, not being perfect is a lot easier to accept than being unworthy. No one thinks they’re perfect. But a lot of us can sure undermine our own sense of worthiness by focusing all of our attention on our our imperfections. But that’s not what people who love us do. And nor should we.
Those challenging aspects of us are not our failures. None of us needs to apologize for the fact that we each don’t match with every single kind of human out of 8 billion humans. That’s normal for every human. That doesn’t have anything to do with us.
That’s just life. We can shrug that off. So let’s seriously stop trying to attack ourselves all the time. Stop pointing out everything you failed to do, or focusing on what you’re not good at it, or what you got wrong.
Those things will always exist because they are what carry the lessons that allow us to grow. Fighting those negative experiences is like fighting to prevent our own growth. Instead, embrace those challenges knowing that despite our mistakes, each of us is born worthy.
No matter what you’ve done, or who you are, you do not owe us anything. You do deserve your own self-respect. And nothing invigorates the best in a human being like feeling good about themselves.
Remember, love is patient, and kind and generous. And both you and the world need more of that. So if you want to make a positive difference, then love yourself and then just do what love does. Because you’ve always been fine just the way you are.
With love, s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.