“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” ~Ernest Hemingway
According to this definition...I am a best people. I absolutely possess a feeling for beauty. Sometimes things that I come upon in this life, are so amazing, so breathtaking that I just have to stop and take it all in. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I just sit down in wondered amazement. Sometimes I snap a photo. Sometimes I just stand there feeling so lucky to have witnessed the beautiful thing at all.
I am a risk taker. Always have been. In my youth, I did a lot of stupid shit that I labeled “risk taking." It was really just me acting like a dumbass and calling that courage. Mostly, I have run scared my entire life. But in all that running to and fro, I have had the courage to follow my heart, my dreams and my intuition. I have left jobs without having any other means of employment. I have moved to places where no one lives, willingly because I knew intuitively that was what was next for me. I have ended things that I likely could have continued for a lot longer, maybe ever. I have always had the courage to take the risks...the only question has been in what direction am I headed, towards self destruction or enlightenment? I am here to tell you those two paths while seemingly quite divergent...actually look a lot a like when you are on them.
If there is one area I have struggled with the most, it is with having the discipline to tell the truth. I have been a liar, a lot. I want to qualify this admission, quite a lot actually. But I won’t. I will just allow my truth and my discipline to tell it to just be. I know I have a hard time telling people I love the truth. Sometimes for bad motives, but more often out of a desire not to hurt them. I pull punches and for a very long time I thought I did it for others, it was a very hard day when I realized that while that might have been the original motive, the real motive was because I didn’t want to endure the disappointment in your eyes when I told you my truth.
So I have capitulated a great deal. I have shaved off my true and truer feelings for some sort of middle path that feels more acceptable and easy. I am working on this. I am working on saying the truth regardless of how I think you may feel about it. I am just sending it and you will do what you do...
It is not easy. I know that being a liar was easier. But I do not like me that that produces, so I have change. And that change, that change takes a lot of time. Somehow for me lying and safety got all tangled up and truth telling became this much larger and unsafer thing. I see the fallacy, I really do. Nevertheless it is hard to change life long patterns that are super ingrained and reinforced.
Ah, the capacity for sacrifice. I have done this a lot as well. Too much and for the wrong people. I have bent myself all kinds of twisty ways in order for you to get your needs met. Never really realizing that if I meet your needs before my own, my own needs, which are totally my responsibility, are rarely met. Then I have a resentment against you because I put you first and I didn’t really want to. Or, or I thought you would eventually show up and sacrifice for me...and then was so bitterly disappointed when you did not. This is still a work in progress also...
And it is absolutely been within these virtues that I have found my own undoing. I have been destroyed. I have been laid the fuck out. Knocked to my knees, repeatedly. And so I must conclude that the best people shall always be a delicate combination of virtuous conduct and selfish motives and schemes. It is jut the plight of humans being human.
I think the goal, if there even is one, is to spend more time in the virtue and less in the congratulatory nature of surviving your own virtuousness.
We are all capable of being destroyed by our own delicacies. But they are also are strength, our backbone and who we are when no one else is looking. I have these virtues, because I am a human living this life and working on myself day after mother fucking day. And because I care about these types of things, I am always going to be vulnerable. And it has been the greatest stupidity of my life, to think, to believe that even for one moment, that attempting to avoid, omit, disown or evade intimacy and vulnerability would keep me safe. My greatest asset, the best thing about me, ever, is to own and acknowledge, improve and accept those virtuous parts of me that make me human and also make me, me.
I cannot avoid vulnerability. Each day I wake and begin a new day, begins another day of my own delicate, fragile and tenuous existence. I get to decide how virutous I want to be and live and love. And when I begin the day heart open, head cleared of all the rubbish I manufacture there, I am signing up to be destroyed, repeatedly. And I have learned, painfully and excruciatingly over time, that this is the best most useful gift of my entire existence. To unfurl myself and my delicacies, my vulnerabilty, my virtuousness and my constant struggle with each and allow life to wound me once more, to come to know the pain of living, and loving and losing and winning, more intimately, more deeply and more profoundly every single day I get to be here trying each moment I draw breath to be the best people I can be.
Again...still. Always.
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