Unexpected
Soapbox time, again.
A few things I've learned over the past months:
People's choices and actions are, when boiled down to their core, driven by one of two emotions:
Love or Fear.
Frequently, a combination of these forces come into play, but these are the two essential elements of all of our decision-making as human beings.
Take my ex-husband for example. His is a life dominated by fear. He is so driven by fear that he makes his worst fears come true. One of his greatest fears, born from childhood experience, is the fear of being abandoned. Thus, every relationship he has, he destroys out of fear as he tests people and pushes them to their limits in order to prove his own fears true that he is not worthy of love. His mental imbalances from war have destroyed his ability to recognize certain social cues, and the combination of his fears and misunderstandings are enormously destructive. Only family members have had enough love and patience to stick around, and even some of them, out of impatience or self-preservation (both based on fear), have given up on him. His anxieties are the dominating factor in his decision-making. He has reactive impulses that are constantly at play, because his altered chemical makeup creates a constant state of hyper-vigilance, and he struggles to remove himself from that state. He is easy to understand, once you recognize the fear.
Looking at people around us, we can frequently differentiate between those who are dominated more by fear and those dominated more by love. Most people use a combination of the two, but usually lean more toward one or the other. It is, of course, preferable to make decisions based on love, but not always realistic.
Fear is at the root of all anger, hatred, misunderstanding, and violence, but fear is not always a bad thing. As I've posted before, it is a necessary emotion and can protect us and drive us to action. However, fear becomes a negative emotion when it is the primary driving force for most of our decisions. In my opinion, becoming fearless is not actually a desirable quality. I admire most those who maintain courage in the face of their fears. These are the people who recognize their fear for what it is. They see their fear's potential for good and evil, and choose to use it to their advantage.
I'm always so good at figuring other people out, diagnosing, prescribing, and "fixing" them, even if they don't want or need me to. It's my vice. My greatest fear was that I would never figure out how to accurately diagnose and fix myself. Multiple times in my life, in very big ways, I have found myself in situations where I am driven primarily by fear, without recognizing I was even heading that direction until too late. From now on, I hope I have learned. I hope I have figured myself out enough to at least recognize those situations as they arrive. We shall see.
Another thing I've been learning, though, is that it's not about me. I'm not even about me. On my quest to discover me, I've come across something remarkable and enlightening.
Yesterday, I finished C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I've thoroughly enjoyed looking at the doctrines of the gospel through his perspective and I find his insights inspiring. The very last paragraph of the book resounded with me in a big way, especially at this particular point in my life:
"But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
My quest to find me, because I am a religious person, has included the natural consequences of finding God as well. The way C.S. Lewis so eloquently put this helped to cement the idea inside of my head and heart. My quest to find me is, truly, a quest to find Him. This releases some of my pressure on myself. I don't always have to understand everything I am thinking or feeling. I don't always have to know the how or why of all that's going on inside and outside of me. Self-awareness is a good thing, but not the most important thing.
Striving to be His will be my main focus, and, in the process, I will emerge.
And in this I will be driven, more often than not I hope, by His pure and perfect love.
This was not the direction I originally intended this post to go. Cool.
A few things I've learned over the past months:
People's choices and actions are, when boiled down to their core, driven by one of two emotions:
Love or Fear.
Frequently, a combination of these forces come into play, but these are the two essential elements of all of our decision-making as human beings.
Take my ex-husband for example. His is a life dominated by fear. He is so driven by fear that he makes his worst fears come true. One of his greatest fears, born from childhood experience, is the fear of being abandoned. Thus, every relationship he has, he destroys out of fear as he tests people and pushes them to their limits in order to prove his own fears true that he is not worthy of love. His mental imbalances from war have destroyed his ability to recognize certain social cues, and the combination of his fears and misunderstandings are enormously destructive. Only family members have had enough love and patience to stick around, and even some of them, out of impatience or self-preservation (both based on fear), have given up on him. His anxieties are the dominating factor in his decision-making. He has reactive impulses that are constantly at play, because his altered chemical makeup creates a constant state of hyper-vigilance, and he struggles to remove himself from that state. He is easy to understand, once you recognize the fear.
Looking at people around us, we can frequently differentiate between those who are dominated more by fear and those dominated more by love. Most people use a combination of the two, but usually lean more toward one or the other. It is, of course, preferable to make decisions based on love, but not always realistic.
Fear is at the root of all anger, hatred, misunderstanding, and violence, but fear is not always a bad thing. As I've posted before, it is a necessary emotion and can protect us and drive us to action. However, fear becomes a negative emotion when it is the primary driving force for most of our decisions. In my opinion, becoming fearless is not actually a desirable quality. I admire most those who maintain courage in the face of their fears. These are the people who recognize their fear for what it is. They see their fear's potential for good and evil, and choose to use it to their advantage.
I'm always so good at figuring other people out, diagnosing, prescribing, and "fixing" them, even if they don't want or need me to. It's my vice. My greatest fear was that I would never figure out how to accurately diagnose and fix myself. Multiple times in my life, in very big ways, I have found myself in situations where I am driven primarily by fear, without recognizing I was even heading that direction until too late. From now on, I hope I have learned. I hope I have figured myself out enough to at least recognize those situations as they arrive. We shall see.
Another thing I've been learning, though, is that it's not about me. I'm not even about me. On my quest to discover me, I've come across something remarkable and enlightening.
Yesterday, I finished C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I've thoroughly enjoyed looking at the doctrines of the gospel through his perspective and I find his insights inspiring. The very last paragraph of the book resounded with me in a big way, especially at this particular point in my life:
"But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
My quest to find me, because I am a religious person, has included the natural consequences of finding God as well. The way C.S. Lewis so eloquently put this helped to cement the idea inside of my head and heart. My quest to find me is, truly, a quest to find Him. This releases some of my pressure on myself. I don't always have to understand everything I am thinking or feeling. I don't always have to know the how or why of all that's going on inside and outside of me. Self-awareness is a good thing, but not the most important thing.
Striving to be His will be my main focus, and, in the process, I will emerge.
And in this I will be driven, more often than not I hope, by His pure and perfect love.
This was not the direction I originally intended this post to go. Cool.
Awesome post. Love ya!
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