Confront Your Darkness and Live
Face The Darkness, You Must Look Where You Least Want To, Make Decisions, Live Anyways
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Face The Darkness
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Face your darkness.
When afraid, face what you fear. Taken upon voluntarily, this will turn the demon in the darkness into something manageable. A pile of clothes left on a chair and casting a menacing silhouette is no longer scary when exposed to light. The devils in our mind are always far more terrifying than what they turn out to be when faced voluntarily and courageously.
There’s a reason for this. We need that impediment on our natural impulsivity as it can lead us into trouble. If we never stop moving forward we will inevitably walk ourselves off a cliff or into a hole we did not see.
Being able to sense something should be done, in addition to understanding there is a chance of danger, allows us to stop for a minute and assess what lies before us.
Unfortunately, this can become a trap. This is especially true during stressful or overly anxious times in our lives. Once we avoid something because we think it’s scary it becomes easier to justify not taking action in the future.
This progresses until we cannot leave our room without crippling anxiety. On the other hand, voluntarily facing what is bothering you can make your next trial easier. Voluntarily is key.
We are creatures of habit. Make truth, courage, and virtue your habits. You’ll have more than wealth, you’ll have meaning.
You Must Look Where You Least Want To
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
The dark portion of the forest holds the brightest light. You must be the one to go in and get it or it will never shine. I speak of those deep dark woods of thought we avoid during our day to day.
Fleeting thoughts are interesting. Festering thoughts however are not so great. Occasionally they’re fine but often they’re quite awful.
But there’s nothing you can do about them, right? No. Not right. Lingering thoughts are calls to action. There are exceptions. There are always exceptions but you must do something.
You must do something that isn’t a distraction. You must do something to address the thought, even if it’s just writing it down. Maybe you’re unhappy in your situation and think about it.
Do something about it. It’s not difficult to figure out how to deal with it, it’s difficult to admit you have power over it. You will lie to yourself and say there’s nothing you can do. That is rarely, if ever, true.
Move. Do something. Improve something. Understand that you are capable. Admit to yourself you can instantiate change. It’s scary because that would involve admitting whatever happens going forward will be a direct result of your actions and inactions. That means admitting you are a victim, but you’re also the perpetrator.
That involves accepting responsibility for you and your actions. It’s responsibility for you and your outcomes. It’s responsibility for how things turn out, how you turn out, how everything around you turns out, and who you are as a person.
And it involves the recognition you are not imperfect. You are not blameless. Many horrible things you have been through have been, at least partially, due to your action or inaction, decisions you’ve made, things you’ve said, whatever it is.
That’s why they linger. That’s why it doesn’t seem like you can get rid of it. You’re looking the wrong way. Yes, it is a problem, this thought. It isn’t THE problem though. The problem lies where you don’t want to look.
Inward.
Hence why mirrors are terrifying. If you could hold up a mirror to your own character and your own thoughts you likely wouldn’t. I sure wouldn’t, that’d be terrifying. There is no way you would remain unchanged.
But it’s necessary to try and see.
Take a look sometime so you can move on.
Make Decisions
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
This sounds obvious, just make decisions. How else can you get anything done? You must keep moving because life keeps moving, time keeps moving, other people keep moving. So that’s a simple concept, right? And because it’s simple, that must mean it’s easy… right?
Unfortunately that’s not the case. Not at first. Life is difficult and decisions have consequences. You will make bad decisions and even when making good decisions, you will still make mistakes.
The problem comes when the fear of mistakes paralyzes you. Consequences as a rule have the potential to be dire and unforeseen issues inevitably arise from every decision.
This is scary, and that’s okay. Be scared but do it anyway. You will fail, you will fall, you will be wrong. You are human; we are imperfect. The trick is to own the decisions you make. If they’re wrong, admit it then move on. If they work, learn what worked, take credit, take notes, remember the success, and move on.
Learn from them, own them and own up to them regardless of success or failure. Take responsibility for them so the next time you have to make similar decisions you know what to do.
Life is about experimentation and learning. With experimentation and learning, there will be missteps and failures. That’s fine. Brush yourself off, pick up the pieces, and do it again. You’re reading this, so there haven’t been any mishaps that have taken you out, so acknowledge that blessing and keep moving.
Live Anyways
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
I am afraid. That’s right, even though I am a father, I am afraid of things. I am afraid of spiders. I do not like them, and I certainly do not want them to jump on me because I don't want to be bitten.
I am afraid of that outcome. I am afraid of snakes. Where are their legs? They are creepy, bitey worms that are literally damned to slither on their bellies by God himself which to me is a sign I am correct to be afraid.
I do not act afraid though. I cannot let that fear keep me from living my life and I will never allow my own fears affect my children. My fears are my own, but I will face them simply to show that you can as well.
Do not allow your fears to dictate or determine your direction. Do not allow them to rob you of experiences in life. Listen to them, there’s a reason the fear is there.
Admit they exist, too. This can help you avoid the added fear of being exposed and seen as fraudulent. Don’t be callous and stupid and incautious, but you should also avoid being paralyzed. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, courage is doing what you must in the presence of fear.
Let's be honest, you would be a fool to not be afraid of the dark. At the very least, you would be a fool not to be afraid of what might be lurking in the dark. The key is to know that whatever may arise, you are capable and you are competent.
Whatever it is, you can handle it.
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Wisdom that is worth sharing
“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy