If we are consumed with how people perceive us, doing something wrong, or being undone by our challenges, there’s nothing left in consciousness from which to make a life.
When all we can do with the whole of our days is check our own pulse, we are in a state of self-conscious preoccupation that blinds us to the world outside ourselves. How am I doing now? Am I okay? How about now? Our problem is in us.
Our perspective of the scale of existence, and our proportion to it, is twisted. Alienated, we’re stuck in the tar of self-protection, greed, and perfectionism. Whether through control or selfishness, we become trapped inside ourselves.
Self-absorption exhausts the energy and attention required to love, create, endure, and participate in life. Our cell is locked. If it’s all we can do to keep from falling apart, we’ll have no space or attention left to pursue anything.
To participate in life’s goodness, we have to be able to lose our Self in the moment—the conversation, the art, the love. We have to notice life happening. Otherwise, we let what life is trying to offer us fall to the ground and walk right past. On our way to where? We don’t know.
To win against the dark side of self, we have to combat bleak, selfish realities with imaginative possibilities.
Imagine your past as an old acquaintance you may check in on, but whose influence has no bearing on your ability to enjoy this moment—an informant at best, certainly not an authority.
Imagine that your pain is not a meaningless mountain of garbage evidencing your failure or victimization, but is something from which you’ll create what comes next. Imagine that pain as source material, necessary fuel.
Imagine letting ‘Is it possible?’ interrupt your certainty. Is it possible that I’m wrong? Is it possible that I don’t have all the information yet? Is it possible I’ll feel different in a few days or weeks?
Imagine your suffering is not the center of existence, that you have a part to play in freeing us all from the tyranny of self. Imagine the people and hardships you resent are the same ones that drove you toward much of what you now love. There would be no this without that.
Imagine there are doors of hidden opportunity still to open, peepholes to the future to peer into.
We can learn skills. They’re just skills. We can learn to value little corrections. We can become teachable again. We can train ourselves to think of others. To look for what we can give. To enlarge what we can receive. To bring more soul to the special moments. But all of this only when we can get our attention off our petty selves.
Quote: The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. Soren Kierkegaard
Song Accompaniment: Work I’ve Done, SirLockeHolmes
2026 The Accompaniments – Apple Music
2026 The Accompaniments – Spotify
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