Silly, Self-Centered. That’s Us.

We make our lives better when we don’t take anyone or anything, especially ourselves, very seriously. What silly, self-centered idiots we are when we think we can have control, force an image, and deny reality. The frantic effort we burn getting our way is comically out of proportion to our actual influence. Imagine the absurdity of us, with our book of mistakes, fearing or intimidating each other.

Most people aren’t out to get us, and those who are hide in plain sight. Self-punishing survival skills are no longer necessary. Haven’t been for quite some time. We don’t need to bring a gun to a life fight. Our defense is overdesigned for a time we already survived. We take too seriously what should make us laugh.

Survival demands hierarchy and strategy. Climb higher. Step on the hands of the person behind us, force our way in. We find overt and covert ways to appear intimidating when we’re anything but. We fine-tune the manipulations that get results and take them front-lines seriously. We wrap our schemes in anxiety and charm, never stopping to assess whether we’re even in real danger, or whether it’s us who are dangerous.

In a world that measures us against cartoon standards, we manipulate our way to the top, gain power over. This unrelenting self is hypercritical, which is another way of saying miserable and frightened. We break that hold by remembering we’re not currently fighting for our lives, not dodging arrows. We don’t have to react to costumes.

And, yet, we do. If we’re stuck, it’s usually because we’re looking out for ourselves and only ourselves. People or circumstances aren’t meeting our demands fast enough, so we become impatient and adversarial, the very moves that guarantee they won’t.

The results are in. We got the stuff and the people, and it didn’t satisfy, didn’t soothe. Aggravated, in fact. What makes us childishly happy isn’t too hard to come by. It’s eye to eye, hand in hand, truth to truth, love.

We surrender our way to freedom. We don’t struggle our way there. We give up immature fears, opinions, and positions. They’re nothing more than a point of view we can easily discard in favor of something that works. We can continue to feel entitled to power and position, or we can choose not to engage in nonsense and instead enjoy our sweet lives.

We’re plenty capable of dealing with whatever comes our way. A preemptive strike against failure or disappointment only guarantees failure and disappointment. We assume far less risk when we stay open to people and to the unknown. Knowing we’ll stand up for ourselves when necessary means we don’t need to stand up to the whole world in the meantime.

The war is over. The tyranny of insanity has ended. We got out alive. The need for comparison and competition has passed. We belong. We’re connected to a whole, finally. Anything beyond that fact doesn’t deserve to be important.