Friday, January 9, 2009

Sage advice. With just a pinch of rosemary...

Having a widely-wandering range of personal/interpersonal desires is almost always a symptom of not knowing yourself well enough to realize what makes you "fulfilled" versus simply "distracted."

Everybody has good qualities, and bad habits; the truth is that a very small proportion of people ever find meaning in their lives beyond simply getting to the next day. Unfortunately, it's true by default that you absorb aspects of your environment - and surrounding yourself with mediocrity, (read: a constant stream of distractions in the form of otherwise unremarkable people and activities), pretty much guarantees you will stay where you are for as long as possible. When you've really figured yourself out from an objective point of view and can see what it is you need in your life to achieve the meaning you need, you'll notice yourself becoming less and less attracted to so many people and "things" on a whim.

The more valuable, more rare, more remarkable aspects of peoples' personalities will take over your interests, as they reflect a similar degree of personal growth as what you (will have) attained. The more complicated beauties in life will become more understandable, and more valuable thus. When you lack the broad perspective to pursue what will ultimately bring your life greater meaning, you end up going after the next best "fix," whichat beststunts your personal growth. This is one of the primary reasons people tend not to be able to hold their own in meaningful relationships, or fail to understand the value of having one. (Interestingly, couples just can't have truly "perfect" sex until both partners understand this implicitly).

When you're at such a stagnant point in your lifeand it's worth noting that MANY people never advance beyond itit would help you greatly to make every possible effort to explicitly *challenge* yourself. The key to discovering self-meaning is to master yourself, and to do so you first have to truly know yourself. To truly know yourself, you need to find out what your potential is; in the grand scheme of things, it's an understanding of your ability to make a contribution to a significant aspect of life that will illuminate your "meaning" within it.

Often a lack of ability (or simply motivation) to change one's circumstancesand realize more significant personal growthis the result of self-doubt and self-ignorance.

Ultimately, we're all much more capable and have far greater potential than our environments and our similarly-dysfunctional neighbors encourage us to expect, or sometimes even to accept. The more you challenge yourself to grow beyond what you currently are, the more you will find you can achieve anything you set your mind to - and subsequently, that will provoke your focus and sense of priority in life to not only evolve in limitless direction, but eventually to do so along one such more narrow and meaningful vector. Keep on keeping on, and look for obstacles to throw yourself against along the way; every one you overcome brings you one step closer to personal truth.

Whenever life throws you a lemon, swallow the god-damned thing whole. You need the calories for the next step:

savagely slamming your head into the face of whichever idiot was throwing lemons!

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