To Examine or Not to Examine?

I believe it was Aristotle who said, "The Un-examined Life is Not Worth Living." I used to be sure who quotations like these were attributed to. Socrates? Plato? I could look it up in my old files if I were still interested, but I'm not really - not right now anyway. In the past, I may have even corrected my own English and grammar (and yours too if I could get away with it), such as never ending a sentence with a preposition as I did a couple of sentences ago. These days, things like that still catch my eye, but they just don't seem as important. I think it was Walt Whitman that said, "The most important thing about communication is being understood." I'm prepared to take his word for it. (Don't bother correcting me if I'm wrong, and I'll leave the grammar and literature to my sister with the PhD in English).

So, I woke up this morning thinking about the things I told the neurologist over the last week. Most of them are true ... to the best of my knowledge and memory. But can I really be sure? Thoughout our lives, we constantly create stories to explain events that we otherwise cannot easily explain (or just don't know) - to answer questions that need answering - by our friends, our family, acquaintances, and even strangers. I imagine it's been that way for ages. I woke up and hour early and laid there for a while with my mind racing, so I got up, fixed some coffee, and sat down to start this blog.

Just before getting my spinal tap yesterday morning, my Doctor asked me about the book I had been reading while waiting for him to arrive. It was rather thick, an 8 in 1 Web Marketing for Dummies book. He looked at it a second and asked what kind of business I was trying to promote. I told him I was a photographer.

The truth is seldom so simple - for a lot of us, I think.

It's funny how a question as simple as, "What do you do for a living?" can be a stumbling block. My life is apparently yet to be defined, and is constantly changing, as evidenced by recent events, so I haven't really been sure what to say until now.

If we're not as successful or happy as we perceive some of our old friends or classmates to be, we stumble with our answer. If we're not proud of what we do for a living - we lie. And there are always those events that can't be explained without a cover story or without risking embarassment, disbelief or even ridicule. So we may lie about that too - or clam up and internalize it. The problem is, some of these little stories become so real that they can take on a life of their very own, and we can no longer tell the difference ourselves.

Robert Louis Stevenson said this about it, "The cruelest lies are often told in silence". These are the lies we tell ourselves, that keep us down, that hold us back, that separate us from the two most important things in life - love and happiness. I would say success also, but there are so many different types of success, I'll save that for another day.

If we're ever to achieve love and happiness, I believe we must begin by tearing down the walls of self-delusion and knock the legs out from under our false assumptions about ourselves. It's the only way to gain an accurate self-image. It's a lifetime struggle, I know, but the journey has to begin somewhere. Why not here?


Michael


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Welcome to The Examined Life 2020

I was a late bloomer to self-awareness. My life didn't really begin until I was 25 years old. It was 1986. That was the year I lost my father to a tragic accident at work.

By the time I was 25, I had been married for 4 years, but I was still an immature kid at heart. I was extremely shy as a child, and sheltered, I had no idea of the kind of gnashing, soul-ripping world outside that waited to ambush me.

Life hadn't taught me a thing except how to be self-centered and alone. Not that I didn't care about people, I wanted desperately to have friends, like we all do, and I tried my best to earn friends, but I learned quickly that very few people are qualified to be a true friend. And I had been too young to know that "people" and "friends" could be a very painful commodity.

I was naive. Having been so shy, I didn't know much about people (turns out I was ADHD). I tried different routes to find friendship, love and happiness.

• I was "nice" to people. Many can and will mistake it for weakness and try to take advantage, mentally, physically or financially. What I've found is that about the only place that "nice" works anymore is in church. But unless your friend truly lives the spiritual life, once you leave those hallowed halls, "nice" goes crashing out the stained-glass window. Don't get me wrong. I was raised in church and went often until my early teens. My dad was even a deacon the last few years of his life. I believe strongly in a Supreme Being and Jesus Christ and the spiritual power that comes from an applied universal law. But I believe that "people" as a whole are not so enlightened as to NOT be self-centered and self-righteous.
• I tried to be fair, which results were similar to being 'nice'.
• I tried to give in more often  to what other people wanted. I was labeled as submissive once because from a spiritual point of view, which few of my acquaintances possessed, I didn't see much point in arguing over trivial things. From a marital point of view, I learned that it was seen as "co-dependency", and I put a stop to it as quickly as possible.
• I gave, gave, gave to my friends until they took, took, took too much. So I had to give, give, give them up for my own self-preservation.

To make a long story short, I was none of those people. I wasn't being true to myself, which is paramount to finding peace in your lifetime. I'll write more about finding yourself in future posts. I've even written a children's book on the subject which I'll tell you more about in future posts.

As a result of all this madness, trying to be who I wasn't, I was a pretty screwed up kid. And "as the twig is bent, the tree inclines" or so Virgil says. I carried many of my neurosis into adulthood. It would be many years before I figured things out. But better late than never, I think.

Since the loss of my father, I've been on a wild mental, spiritual and even physical journey that I can't wait to tell you about. I've learned lessons that hopefully you'll never have to. I'll be speaking not only from personal experience,  but I'll be drawing from quotations new and old, stories, movies, and even my own imaginaton at time. But in the end, I hope that something I say in this blog will help you to:

1. avoid some of the pitfalls I experienced,.
2. avoid some of the pain,
3. find peace, love and happiness in your life before it's too late.

So please subscribe to my blog. I may not be a psychologist, but I've experienced enough life, death, troubles, trials and tribulations to kill a horse.

Welcome to The Examined Life 2020!