BELIEVING
April 1 Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was. It’s hard to run a race if you start off standing in a hole. Yet that’s just the handicap many people face when they begin their quest for self-esteem. For them, because of early disadvantages, just crawling out of the hole to get to the starting line is an exhausting effort. It doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t. But the fact is that we can only take off from where we are.
We who have heard “You can’t,” “You’ll lose,” “You don’t deserve to win,” all our lives have to shake off those muddy messages before we can run free. All the resentment and self-pity in the world, understandable though it may be, won’t turn what is into what ought to have been. The mud is there. Until we commit ourselves to cleaning it off and throwing it out, our running shoes will be heavy. So what if others were better prepared than we? So what if our would-be trainers and coaches let us down? That’s their responsibility, not ours, and that all happened yesterday, not today.
Those of us who start out with handicaps, who today are standing in a hole dug by others yesterday, need to give ourselves credit for standing at all. We need to stop resenting where we are and start loving ourselves for the daily courage it takes to suit up and show up. We deserve a new start and we can have it if we stop looking backward.
Underdogs who start winning are no longer underdogs.
April 2 If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living. Are we prepared to do what it takes to win our own approval? Often that means being willing to wage war on our emotions. Old feelings of guilt, fear, rage, or impotence may well be circling our camp, threatening to stop our journey forward. These familiar enemies must be faced and dealt with if we mean to keep on going. It’s not a campaign for sissies.
One thing that helps is to stop being surprised every time we see those feelings looming on the horizon. Haven’t we learned by now that they’re a persistent lot? Did we really imagine they were gone for good when we drove them away last time? If we did, we were kidding ourselves. Those feelings are as real as we are and they may very well be hot on our tracks as long as we’re alive.
There’s a reason for our feelings. That reason may be so hidden in the past that we’ll never discover it—but a reason exists. That’s why we can never take one last and final stand against negative emotions. Victory over marauding feelings is a matter of endurance and acceptance. The trick is to go on anyway, to gain as much ground as we can before they catch up with us the next time and to remember all the battles we’ve won before.
“Oh, it’s you again” is the appropriate greeting when a negative emotion forces its way into my mind.
April 3 Work and love—these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis. Cloud watchers and dandelion blowers may argue that work and love are not all there is to life, but without them we don’t have the essential ingredients for a life worth esteeming.
Work is good for people. It is in work that we create ourselves by expressing our spirits in muscle. In order to be, we need to do, to make, to create. And it is in loving and being loved that what we are and what we are becoming is affirmed and celebrated. Who could appreciate a life without love?
Many things can go wrong in our lives. Many losses will be experienced—yet never, in one way or another, must we ever give up being creative or loving. As long as they exist, we continue. As long as we are working on something and loving somebody, we’ll be a whole lot healthier than we are sick.
Good work and good companions are the building blocks of self-esteem.
April 4 The crime is not to avoid failure. The crime is not to give triumph a chance. Tom still talks about not going out for the basketball team when he was fifteen. “I really wanted to play,” he remembers thirty years later. “But I was afraid I wouldn’t be good enough. It would have hurt a lot if I didn’t make the team. I couldn’t take the rejection, you know.” So Tom never learned to play basketball.
Many of us have similar stories. Because we wouldn’t risk failure, we didn’t dare to try. And because we didn’t try, we never did do what we dreamed of doing. So now we still can’t dance or sing or play the trumpet. And it’s too late to try out for the basketball team.
Now that we’re adults, we realize that we gave up too much to avoid the chance of failure. So these days we’re making more mature decisions. If we’re the least-limber members of our aerobics class, so what? If our kids laugh at our beginning ceramics projects, we can laugh along with them. We know that regret is too costly when we hear Tom say, “Every once in a while, in my head, I can see myself playing on that team. If I only had the chance to do it all over…”
Fear of failure clips my wings; if I want to fly I have to try.
April 5 The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears, wishes rather than with their minds. Self-esteem demands a steady diet of success. It may not always have to be the accomplishment of some great external goal, it might be the successful simplification of one’s life—which is no mean feat. Whatever form the success takes, however, it must be a regular experience if our self-acceptance and self-appreciation are going to grow.
Most accomplishments of either the inner or the outer variety require clear thinking. To move along a desired and clearly chosen path means that we know where we’re headed and have some idea of how to get there. If we haven’t thoroughly thought that through, especially if we’ve substituted emotions for thoughts, we’re not likely to make much progress.
It is not what we hope or fear or wish that makes us winners—it’s what we decide. To experience success, we need to make good solid decisions based on good solid thinking.
Success requires that I push my surface emotions out of the driver’s seat.
April 6 Who has deceived thee so oft’ as thyself? How annoyed we are when we discover that someone has lied to us! We’re hurt that they didn’t trust us with the truth—and angry that they took us in. We feel resentful, betrayed, and righteously indignant. The longer we mull it over, the more they become disgraceful infidels and we became staunch defenders of honesty and truth.
We’re a lot more lenient with our own lies, of course. Because most of us tell ourselves a hundred lies for every lie that is told to us, we’ve had a lot more practice forgiving ourselves. Why does a lie seem much worse when we’re on the receiving end? Is the lie itself so offensive? Or is it the fact that we were lied to? What was really violated—our moral standards or our pride?
Few people indeed belong on a pedestal of righteousness. Such lofty perches are always dangerous to self-esteem. If the cure for dishonesty begins at home, a first step may be to climb down from the pedestal. And a second may be to call a spade a spade. A lie is a lie is a lie, whether it’s our own or someone else’s. Whether we choose to forgive it or not depends on how badly our ego was bruised—not the fact that we were lied to. Hurt feelings don’t entitle us to moral outrage.
It isn’t fair to hold other people more accountable than I hold myself.
April 7 Let go and let God. Like any other Twelve Step slogan, “Let go and let God” can be twisted to justify and support just about any wrong turn we decide to take. Indeed, to abuse the truth of a slogan is very much like turning an arrow so that it points away, not toward, a town. If we follow in that direction, we won’t get where we were trying to go.
Basically, all this slogan means is that we should not take responsibility for outcomes over which we have no control. As so many have shared over so many years, we have either to “be” God or “let” God; we have to stop trying to force results.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have any responsibility. We are still obliged to do everything we can to make the positive outcomes possible. It is not enough when we come to a roadblock to sit down, “turn it over,” and wait for God’s removal crew to come along and take care of the problem. The effort and the footwork are still on our own job ticket. It’s only the outcome we have to let go.
Letting go means taking care of my own business, not abandoning it.
April 8 As he thinketh in his heart, so is he. Proverbs 28:7 “Read the Bible,” said the country preacher to his little flock, “there are some mighty good things in that book.” One of them is the quote above. The message is as clear and direct as it appears to be: Our thoughts define not only ourselves, but all expectations of what will become of our efforts and dreams.
Positive self-esteem is largely a matter of being grounded in positive thought. Many of us are only dimly aware of the constant dialogue going on in our heads. And even if we hear it, we often don’t listen to it. Yet our habitual patterns of thinking are the very basis of our reality. Our thoughts dictate the quality of our lives.
One walks in the rain; another just gets wet. One prays; another just says prayers. One makes love; another takes hostages. The outward appearance of each behavior is the same, but the reality experienced within is totally different. The thinking behind the deed is what decides the matter. Are we shrinking back or pressing forward? Counting our losses or building our gains? Onlookers can’t see the difference. Doing isn’t being. Only the voice of the heart can tell us what’s really going on behind the dancing mask of daily activity.
Positive thoughts translate into positive actions. How positive is the thinking that shapes my behavior?
April 9 If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it. There’s a lot of difference between a mind that’s willing to consider new ideas and a mind that claims no ideas as its own. But there are many who pride themselves, even base their self-esteem, on being open-minded when in fact they may lack the courage to take a stand. Whoever said that a mind should be open on both ends?
We aren’t being flexible when we bend or suspend our own beliefs in favor of every new idea that blows by. We aren’t being sophisticated when we listen without comment to ugly racist or sexist remarks. Judgment is a function of intelligence, and intelligence rejects as well as accepts.
Healthy openness means being willing to bounce new information off the body of information we’ve already tried and tested. No thinking adult is a blank slate. It’s entirely appropriate to set up sensible boundaries around our own values and beliefs. “Who says so?” and “How does this fit?” are good questions to ask when testing new input. As always, integrity is defended by making wise choices.
The object of open-mindedness is not to let the wind whistle between my ears.
April 10 A person who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. Words like control, master, and take charge appear again and again in literature that promotes self-esteem or any positive growth. These terms usually advise saddling some troubling emotion or putting a bit in the mouth of fear. When some impulse is running wild, we’re taught to rein it in.
But restraint is not the only purpose of inner control. Taking charge has more upbeat consequences as well. If we can subdue fear, then so can we conjure up pleasure. If this control can diminish the power others have over us, can it not stoke up the power we have over ourselves? Once we can direct our own inner dialogue, we also get to decide how much fun we will have and which adventures we will choose. When we choose what shall stay and what shall go, a whole new world opens up to us.
To be a “master” of anything seems like heavy work leading to heavy responsibility. And it is. But mastery is also rewarding. What could be better than designing our own delights?
Anyone who can be a dungeon master can also be a circus master.
April 11 Nostalgia is a seductive liar. Oh, for the good old days! In those long lost, golden times our self-esteem was sky high, life was sweet, and problems were few. If only we could return to the splendid days that were! Our lives would be just as happy and trouble-free as they used to be!
Hogwash. When we catch ourselves enshrining our yesterdays, we need to put on our glasses and take a clearer look backward. For all its remembered goodness, we will see that it was not all that good. We’ve forgotten all the hard knocks that won us the wisdom we have today. Forgotten, too, are the fears, jealousies, failures, and disappointments strewn among the glorious flowers of memory.
The days we have now are also good days. Flowers are growing. Music is playing. It’s a wonderful thing to have happy memories. But we live in today and it is today that awaits our pleasure.
Self-esteem must be remade afresh each day, in the here and now.
April 12 One must not always think that feeling is everything. When self-esteem is the topic, feelings usually are the gauge. That is, most of us are only aware of positive self-esteem when our feelings tell us we have it. Most often, we let how we feel control our sense of who we are and how we are.
It can be most helpful to remember that feelings only face backward; they can only reflect what was. As important as it is to be in touch with our feelings, we must not let our feelings get us in a stranglehold. It is equally important to keep our feelings from making decisions that need to be made by our heads.
Self-esteem, of course, is made up of many things, only one of which is how we feel. Suppose we are trying hard to stick up for ourselves to talk straight, to get started in a self-help group, open a savings account, or begin a weight-control program. But suppose we don’t feel comfortable with the new behavior or don’t feel like we are making enough progress. We know it’s good but it doesn’t feel good. The only thing to do at such a time is to keep right on moving the muscles. If self-esteem is to be a fact, it has to be more than just a feeling.
Feelings give me information, but rational thought must do the processing.
April 13 Togetherness is a substitute sense of community, a counterfeit communion. Some of us seek—no, demand—a suffocating degree of togetherness with the people we love best. Although we’re far too mannerly to open a door without knocking, we think nothing of barging in on the lives of our grown children, for example. Although we’d never snoop in someone’s purse, it never occurs to us that we’re invading our friends’ privacy when we insist that they “tell us everything.”
Those of us who like to talk about how “close” or “inseparable” we are with others need to check out our motives. Does the togetherness we insist on meet the needs of the others, or just our own? Are we binding them to us out of love—which is enslaving? Do we hold them so close because we love them so much, or because we feel so insecure and incomplete in ourselves?
Although we usually mean well, our trespassing on other people’s personal space may be causing them discomfort and grief. Let’s be very sure, before we latch on to others in a viselike grip of closeness, that their idea of loving behavior is the same as ours.
Even the “closest” people need spaces in their togetherness.
April 14 Those who know the least of others think the highest of themselves. Those of us who aren’t vulnerable to chemical addictions often secretly feel superior to those of us who are. Although we’re reluctant to admit it, we wrinkle our noses, raise our eyebrows, and shiver in genteel disgust at the addict’s blatant loss of control. “Thank God it isn’t me,” we say in our heart of hearts as we tiptoe around the drunk slumped on the street, “I’ve got my problems, but at least they aren’t that bad!”
Yet are we really so different? But for chemical invulnerability—an unmerited gift of fate—are we really better people? Are we as free as we think we are of ugliness and self-degradation? Do some of our toxic thoughts and behaviors not have a poisonous effect on ourselves and the people around us? Is sick in private so different from sick in public?
What of the vicious gossip? The remorseless liar? The selfishly indifferent parent? What of our compulsive eating or shopping or faultfinding? The fact is that chemical addiction is only one way to erode integrity; there are many others and most of us are familiar with them. There are more similarities than differences between us and our chemically addicted brothers and sisters.
Among the halt and the lame, there is little rationale for a sense of superiority.
April 15 Forewarned is forearmed. Many victims of depression, when searching for clues and patterns, find that their ailment is cyclical. For whatever reasons, at certain times of year, their spirits plummet to the ground like downed birds. Perhaps it’s the anniversary of a parent’s death, a business failure, or another sad time. Or perhaps it’s related to the amount of sunlight available, or biorhythms, or brain chemistry.
Recognizing a predictable pattern can make a real difference. The ability to anticipate anything always puts a few more cards in our hand. It may not prevent the depression, but at least we won’t be caught off guard.
If we know what’s coming up, appropriate steps may be taken. Important appointments may be made for a later date, significant decisions may be worked out ahead of time or put off, perhaps something as simple as hiring more baby-sitting so we can have more free time may assist us in feeling better during a bad time.
When I fight against depression, I fight for self-esteem.
April 16 Becoming ill is the price you pay for driving yourself too hard. Low self-esteem doesn’t always show itself as cringing passivity. Many overachievers are hounded by the need, rooted in low self-esteem, to push themselves beyond any reasonable effort. Even in recovery, such people may nearly drive themselves to ruin by relentlessly practicing slowing down, taking it easy, and learning to enjoy. They work so hard at finding some enjoyment they get too tired to have any fun at all!
How can we learn to honor a self we’re already abusing? If we were racehorse owners, we wouldn’t dream of pushing our valuable animals so hard. “How much did you get accomplished?” is the wrong question for us. Instead, we should ask ourselves if we have hugged a friend, taken a walk, read a novel, or told a joke.
There is neither virtue nor valor in driving ourselves until we are ill. Utter exhaustion is the enemy of health and of self-esteem as well. We need to give ourselves at least as much consideration and care as we’d give a horse.
I deserve to relax and have fun.
April 17 The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. The search for greater self-knowledge is much like an archaeological dig. The farther down we go, the more surprises we’re likely to find. Some are more fun than others. Often, one of our less-pleasing discoveries is our skill in using acceptable words to name our unacceptable character flaws.
The quality we used to call perseverance, for example, may turn out to be plain old stubbornness once we clean it off and take a good look. Our compassion and generosity may look an awful lot like codependent enabling and our straightforwardness, like crass insensitivity. Of course, we realized we had flaws, but who guessed they would be so serious-or that so many of them would be the so-called “virtues” that we were proud of!
But we shouldn’t be too discouraged by our character flaws. They’re not evidence of our depravity, but of our humanity. Even the spiritual giants of this world are not perfect. Flawlessness is not a condition that applies to human beings. To identify a character flaw is like naming a disease after the lab results come in. The lab report doesn’t cause the disease. It simply tells what it is, so a remedy can be prescribed.
I have to know what’s hurting me if I want to fix it.
April 18 Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. The old saying “Once burned, twice shy” doesn’t tell the half of it. Some of us burn victims resolve that we’ll never go near another fire for the rest of our lives. Rather than risk another scorching, we turn our backs on the warmth, the light, and the merry companionship offered by a blazing campfire on a chilly night.
We are victims of love gone wrong. Unlike others who wipe away their tears and go back to the party, we weren’t just disappointed, but devastated, not just wounded, but mortally wounded. Our blood, when we were pierced by rejection, ran redder than anyone else’s blood, our pain was more painful. So how could we be expected to take another chance, to try again?
Yet the fear of hurt can hurt us more than anything. And if we avoid injury by sitting on the bench, we miss out on the game. If a relationship crumbled in spite of our best efforts, then that relationship wasn’t meant to be. A better possibility is out there waiting for us. But we’ll only have the chance of finding it if we take off our bandages and get back in the game.
I am a lot more resilient than I think I am.
April 19 Be careful not to test the water with both feet. To put yourself in a lose-lose situation is to lose for sure. And when you lose often enough, self-esteem erodes. In striving for self-confidence, it is as important to know what not to do as what to do.
Many situations that look good on the surface may not really be good at all. Learning to test cautiously a situation, relationship, or new venture so as to minimize risk is a critical part of building self-esteem. Just because a proposition or a person looks good or sounds good does not mean he/she/it is genuine. We need to test it out without totally exposing ourselves before making a commitment. There’s no insult in that to the other; sincerity is always subject to proof.
If mere words were facts, thousands of broke hustlers would be millionaires. Many are those who can make any deal sound too good to pass up. But the rosy picture can look quite different beneath the surface. It’s just good sense to take your time, get references, check track records, before investing more than you can afford to lose.
A toe in the water before the headlong plunge will help me achieve and maintain my self-esteem.
April 20 We are alive, and that is the only place we need to be to start. Our needs are much simpler than our wants. We may want perfect flying weather and a detailed flight plan, but insistence on ideal conditions may make the difference between staying or going. All we really need to take off is to be alive.
No one is too beaten down, too old, or too anything else to begin a self-improvement program. Willingness, and willingness alone, is the total price of the ticket. The next thing to do is to get rid of excess baggage-like the notion that this or that condition must be met before we begin. Once we take responsibility for where we are and who we are, the only thing left is here we are! Where else do we need to be?
Change is about process, and the improvement process has much more to do with our direction than our starting place. If we’re starting at 10 and going for 100, or if we’re starting at 1,000 and shooting for the stratosphere, we’re still in process. It is the same infinite journey for all of us. On this side of the grave, there never will be a time when the journey toward completion is over. And that’s not because we’re so broken-it’s because the possibilities are so great.
Starting is all there is, so here I go!
April 21 Nobody expects to find comfort and companionability in reformers. When we can’t find a perfect mate, some of us try to make one. The recipe is simple, isn’t it? All you need is a diamond in the rough and a lot of elbow grease. Then it’s just a matter of polish, polish, polish! When we first start out on such a project it seems so sensible, so doable, and well-so good of us to go to so much trouble for somebody else!
But another person can’t be a “project” any more than he or she can be a pet. No healthy relationship ever starts out as a salvage operation. We may say, “I just want what’s best for you,” yet when we try to re-create someone in our own image of perfection, we’re violating that person’s integrity-and our own as well. Eventually, although they may go along with our meddling at first, our human projects get tired of our one-upmanship; they end up feeling resentful and we end up feeling unappreciated.
Healthy self-esteem demands that we accept ourselves and other people for what they are. We don’t have the right to bully people into changing their habits and styles. To do so in the name of love demeans them, us, and the concept of love itself.
I’m not God and other people aren’t lumps of clay that need shaping up.
April 22 Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. As much as we hear workaholism decried, we hear even more compelling voices telling us that the fast track is the only place to be if we’ve got the right stuff to make it to the top. No pain, no gain is the motto that drives us to work through lunch. Go all out! Is the battle cry that pushes us to produce by moonlight. To secure our place on the winning team, we may become afraid even to take a day off.
But constant work is as abnormal as constant sleep. Whatever the lopsided benefit, we violate our physical and spiritual need for rhythm, for ebb and flow, when we use up all our energy in one area of our lives. We deny human nature when we deny ourselves the rest and recreation we need to replenish our resources. And natural consequences occur when we deny human nature.
Exhaustion and emptiness are the inevitable result of chronic overwork. Any version of success that requires such dues is a counterfeit of the real thing. Shiny and seductive as the payoff may seem, dedication shouldn’t cost us every waking moment. If it does, we need to think again about what makes a successful life. We need to stop looking for gold down there in the salt mines.
Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
April 23 The avenues in my neighborhood are Pride, Covetousness, and Lust; the cross streets are Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. I live over on Sloth, and the style on our street is to avoid the other thoroughfares. What do you think? Some of us have created a lot of awful messes through the years. We’ve committed some big, juicy sins that fill us with remorse and regret. Others of us have stayed out of trouble and kept our noses clean. Our records aren’t full of black spots, but then they’re not very full of anything. We haven’t done much wrong because we haven’t done much. Which of us is better off?
Both of us have work to do if we want to get more out of the future than we did out of the past. If we’ve done damage, our obvious task is to make whatever repairs we can, forgive ourselves, and start walking a straighter path. If we’ve hidden out in passive inactivity, venturing little and gaining less, we need to get out of the stands and onto the field. There’s no virtue or joy in being a spectator of the game of life.
We can ruin our lives by omission as well as commission. What we don’t do can often cause us more regret, in the long run, than the mistakes we make. Better to risk a wrong turn than to sit out our lives.
If I hang back, I will lose out.
April 24 Upon deciding, be quick to act. Some gaps on the road can seem too broad for leaping. But if we can’t get across them, we’re stuck. All forward motion comes to a halt, and the journey toward self-realization is over. One of these gaps is the cavern that stands between decision and action.
After making a decision, a person is different. Whether you have decided to stay or leave, start or stop, risk or conserve, you have opted for change. Mentally, you have already done it. To fail to act on a well-considered decision is to invite confusion, double messages, and emotional chaos. With the loss of will, integrity is also lost.
Sometimes, because we’re afraid to act, we won’t even admit that, deep down, we’ve already made a decision. Perhaps, for example, we’ve completely withdrawn our spirits from a hated job or a dead marriage. By denying that we’ve already pulled out, we deny our own truth. This denial not only devastates our self-esteem, but it widens the gap between where we are now and our next destination. Sooner or later we’re going to have to take the leap. Why not sooner?
Once made, an important decision will cause me trouble until I act on it.
April 25 What I’m dealing with is bad enough. I can’t deal with worse right now. Sometimes rallying cries like “Now or never!” are worse than useless. This is so when the situation we’re facing is already, in its present form, draining every bit of energy we have. At this point to say, “All or nothing!” is to guarantee nothing.
Even well-intentioned friends may push us into thinking that some terribly difficult action must be launched right now. They may insist that we launch a mighty initiative, ready for not, for our own good. But only we can judge our own readiness or our own good.
The woman quoted above was telling her group that she was doing the best she could-today-with her chemically dependent son. She knew there was a crisis coming, that she would have to tell her boy he couldn’t continue to use drugs and live under her roof at the same time. But that crisis was a “worse” she couldn’t handle today. Right now it was all she could do to get to her meetings, build up her strength, and pray. She was wise to know that it’s better not to shout “Do or die!” before you’re ready to do.
Getting ready may be half the battle.
April 26 Nobody ever went to his deathbed wishing he’d spent more time at the office. Writing your own epitaph is a thought-provoking exercise at some personal growth workshops. What should our tombstones say? How do we want to be remembered? What mattered most to us in life? What legitimate claim can we make of our contribution to the world?
Participants in this exercise often begin with uneasy laughter and then start coming up with ways they would not like to be remembered. “Here lies Carla,” one woman said in a flash of amused self-awareness, “she meant well.” After that icebreaker, several others chipped in their own revealing self-characterizations. “He never missed a day of work,” one man said with nearly as much pride as gentle self-mockery. More than a few people nodded and smiled in self-recognition.
The balance between work and play is crucial to our well-being. If we want our full share of joy in life, if we mean to honor the balanced values we profess, we would do well to meditate now rather than later on the legends we live by.
What do I most want to do or be before I run out of days?
April 27 The past is smoke. When necessary, blow it away. It has often been said that our perceptions are like glasses that, once in place, affect and color all we see. That vision, of course, becomes our reality, our truth. But it is important to realize that most of our perceptions were forged in a fire that is now history. A fire long grown cold. What happened, happened, it can never be undone. However, there is no need to drag it through each day of our present life.
Most obstacles to enjoying a positive, gentile self-image are due to the negative lessons we learned long ago. Those lessons reinforce perfectionism; passivity; fear of intimacy; or feelings of unworthiness, love, or happiness. These are lessons of the past. As such, they are smoke. Not real anymore unless we allow them to be real.
Many a brave soul, trudging toward a better tomorrow, has come to learn how to deal with a “shame attack.” That means recognizing that it is a flashback that can either blow away like dandelion seeds or take root in the present. We are the ones who must decide whether the power of the past will grow or go.
I can allow the ugly past to blow away. All it takes is the desire and the effort to let it go.
April 28 Friendships, like marriage, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. Everybody knows that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But perhaps we don’t stop to consider how important this homely bit of folk wisdom may be to our personal relationships. Some words simply must never be spoken; some situations must never be allowed to occur. Our treasured relationships are just too valuable to handle carelessly.
Nothing is worth the unforgivable insult or betrayal. Far better for us to appear the coward and walk out the door if a confrontation is going out of control. Far wiser to shoot ourselves in the foot rather than pierce a friend’s soft underbelly with an unhealable wound.
Occasional strain and friction are inevitable in any relationship. But we need loving relationships with our friends to support our self-esteem. When there is conflict, we may need to withdraw to protect their self-esteem as well as our own. At a later time, when tempers and tensions have cooled, we will both be glad of the self-restraint.
Sometimes retreat is the only way to win.
April 29 To know one’s self, one should assert one’s self. There are times when a feeling of insignificance assails us. Very often this is a false perception that needs to be quickly banished. The truth is that we are more important than we sometimes think we are.
There is no reason not to be proud of the constructive things we have done. It is a mistake to minimize the successful completion of a task, the learning of a new skill, a good habit strengthened or a bad habit eliminated. Most of us have many, many worthwhile accomplishments, great and small, to feel good about. We are more worthwhile and attractive than we sometimes realize.
It often helps to advertise our achievements a bit, instead of always being so frank about our failures. This can be done without boasting. An honest recital of an accomplishment or a mention of a skill shows healthy self-esteem. It is not being “modest” when we shy away from asserting ourselves. We can’t expect other people to continually reassure us of our worth if we’re not willing to speak up for ourselves.
There’s nothing wrong with tooting my own horn once in a while.
April 30 Two things are bad for the heart-running uphill and running down people. Trashing others as a “harmless” form of amusement is a nasty habit. But it’s common enough to prop ourselves up by putting other people down. No doubt it’s the major sport in most workplaces. Unfortunately, people bashing is a sport that injures the self-esteem of everyone who plays it.
This is so for a couple of reasons. The first is the psychological axiom that the mind always moves toward its dominant thought. To run down people, we must first stoke our minds with negative thoughts. Those thoughts are then translated into cutting words. But the very act of inviting and hosting negative thoughts cuts into ourselves first. Before we even say a word, we’ve done damage.
The second reason we are hurt when we run people down is that we weaken any possibility of forming a bond of community with them. Self-esteem is based on membership in a community of some sort. It’s fostered by people who care. People we can count on. People whose smiles tell us they are glad to see us. Habitually running people down makes us poor untrustworthy candidates for membership in such a community.
Far better for health, mental as well as spiritual, to grow from the exercise of lifting other up!
Healthy people don’t make sport of other people’s flaws.
April 1 Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was. It’s hard to run a race if you start off standing in a hole. Yet that’s just the handicap many people face when they begin their quest for self-esteem. For them, because of early disadvantages, just crawling out of the hole to get to the starting line is an exhausting effort. It doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t. But the fact is that we can only take off from where we are.
We who have heard “You can’t,” “You’ll lose,” “You don’t deserve to win,” all our lives have to shake off those muddy messages before we can run free. All the resentment and self-pity in the world, understandable though it may be, won’t turn what is into what ought to have been. The mud is there. Until we commit ourselves to cleaning it off and throwing it out, our running shoes will be heavy. So what if others were better prepared than we? So what if our would-be trainers and coaches let us down? That’s their responsibility, not ours, and that all happened yesterday, not today.
Those of us who start out with handicaps, who today are standing in a hole dug by others yesterday, need to give ourselves credit for standing at all. We need to stop resenting where we are and start loving ourselves for the daily courage it takes to suit up and show up. We deserve a new start and we can have it if we stop looking backward.
Underdogs who start winning are no longer underdogs.
April 2 If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living. Are we prepared to do what it takes to win our own approval? Often that means being willing to wage war on our emotions. Old feelings of guilt, fear, rage, or impotence may well be circling our camp, threatening to stop our journey forward. These familiar enemies must be faced and dealt with if we mean to keep on going. It’s not a campaign for sissies.
One thing that helps is to stop being surprised every time we see those feelings looming on the horizon. Haven’t we learned by now that they’re a persistent lot? Did we really imagine they were gone for good when we drove them away last time? If we did, we were kidding ourselves. Those feelings are as real as we are and they may very well be hot on our tracks as long as we’re alive.
There’s a reason for our feelings. That reason may be so hidden in the past that we’ll never discover it—but a reason exists. That’s why we can never take one last and final stand against negative emotions. Victory over marauding feelings is a matter of endurance and acceptance. The trick is to go on anyway, to gain as much ground as we can before they catch up with us the next time and to remember all the battles we’ve won before.
“Oh, it’s you again” is the appropriate greeting when a negative emotion forces its way into my mind.
April 3 Work and love—these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis. Cloud watchers and dandelion blowers may argue that work and love are not all there is to life, but without them we don’t have the essential ingredients for a life worth esteeming.
Work is good for people. It is in work that we create ourselves by expressing our spirits in muscle. In order to be, we need to do, to make, to create. And it is in loving and being loved that what we are and what we are becoming is affirmed and celebrated. Who could appreciate a life without love?
Many things can go wrong in our lives. Many losses will be experienced—yet never, in one way or another, must we ever give up being creative or loving. As long as they exist, we continue. As long as we are working on something and loving somebody, we’ll be a whole lot healthier than we are sick.
Good work and good companions are the building blocks of self-esteem.
April 4 The crime is not to avoid failure. The crime is not to give triumph a chance. Tom still talks about not going out for the basketball team when he was fifteen. “I really wanted to play,” he remembers thirty years later. “But I was afraid I wouldn’t be good enough. It would have hurt a lot if I didn’t make the team. I couldn’t take the rejection, you know.” So Tom never learned to play basketball.
Many of us have similar stories. Because we wouldn’t risk failure, we didn’t dare to try. And because we didn’t try, we never did do what we dreamed of doing. So now we still can’t dance or sing or play the trumpet. And it’s too late to try out for the basketball team.
Now that we’re adults, we realize that we gave up too much to avoid the chance of failure. So these days we’re making more mature decisions. If we’re the least-limber members of our aerobics class, so what? If our kids laugh at our beginning ceramics projects, we can laugh along with them. We know that regret is too costly when we hear Tom say, “Every once in a while, in my head, I can see myself playing on that team. If I only had the chance to do it all over…”
Fear of failure clips my wings; if I want to fly I have to try.
April 5 The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears, wishes rather than with their minds. Self-esteem demands a steady diet of success. It may not always have to be the accomplishment of some great external goal, it might be the successful simplification of one’s life—which is no mean feat. Whatever form the success takes, however, it must be a regular experience if our self-acceptance and self-appreciation are going to grow.
Most accomplishments of either the inner or the outer variety require clear thinking. To move along a desired and clearly chosen path means that we know where we’re headed and have some idea of how to get there. If we haven’t thoroughly thought that through, especially if we’ve substituted emotions for thoughts, we’re not likely to make much progress.
It is not what we hope or fear or wish that makes us winners—it’s what we decide. To experience success, we need to make good solid decisions based on good solid thinking.
Success requires that I push my surface emotions out of the driver’s seat.
April 6 Who has deceived thee so oft’ as thyself? How annoyed we are when we discover that someone has lied to us! We’re hurt that they didn’t trust us with the truth—and angry that they took us in. We feel resentful, betrayed, and righteously indignant. The longer we mull it over, the more they become disgraceful infidels and we became staunch defenders of honesty and truth.
We’re a lot more lenient with our own lies, of course. Because most of us tell ourselves a hundred lies for every lie that is told to us, we’ve had a lot more practice forgiving ourselves. Why does a lie seem much worse when we’re on the receiving end? Is the lie itself so offensive? Or is it the fact that we were lied to? What was really violated—our moral standards or our pride?
Few people indeed belong on a pedestal of righteousness. Such lofty perches are always dangerous to self-esteem. If the cure for dishonesty begins at home, a first step may be to climb down from the pedestal. And a second may be to call a spade a spade. A lie is a lie is a lie, whether it’s our own or someone else’s. Whether we choose to forgive it or not depends on how badly our ego was bruised—not the fact that we were lied to. Hurt feelings don’t entitle us to moral outrage.
It isn’t fair to hold other people more accountable than I hold myself.
April 7 Let go and let God. Like any other Twelve Step slogan, “Let go and let God” can be twisted to justify and support just about any wrong turn we decide to take. Indeed, to abuse the truth of a slogan is very much like turning an arrow so that it points away, not toward, a town. If we follow in that direction, we won’t get where we were trying to go.
Basically, all this slogan means is that we should not take responsibility for outcomes over which we have no control. As so many have shared over so many years, we have either to “be” God or “let” God; we have to stop trying to force results.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have any responsibility. We are still obliged to do everything we can to make the positive outcomes possible. It is not enough when we come to a roadblock to sit down, “turn it over,” and wait for God’s removal crew to come along and take care of the problem. The effort and the footwork are still on our own job ticket. It’s only the outcome we have to let go.
Letting go means taking care of my own business, not abandoning it.
April 8 As he thinketh in his heart, so is he. Proverbs 28:7 “Read the Bible,” said the country preacher to his little flock, “there are some mighty good things in that book.” One of them is the quote above. The message is as clear and direct as it appears to be: Our thoughts define not only ourselves, but all expectations of what will become of our efforts and dreams.
Positive self-esteem is largely a matter of being grounded in positive thought. Many of us are only dimly aware of the constant dialogue going on in our heads. And even if we hear it, we often don’t listen to it. Yet our habitual patterns of thinking are the very basis of our reality. Our thoughts dictate the quality of our lives.
One walks in the rain; another just gets wet. One prays; another just says prayers. One makes love; another takes hostages. The outward appearance of each behavior is the same, but the reality experienced within is totally different. The thinking behind the deed is what decides the matter. Are we shrinking back or pressing forward? Counting our losses or building our gains? Onlookers can’t see the difference. Doing isn’t being. Only the voice of the heart can tell us what’s really going on behind the dancing mask of daily activity.
Positive thoughts translate into positive actions. How positive is the thinking that shapes my behavior?
April 9 If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it. There’s a lot of difference between a mind that’s willing to consider new ideas and a mind that claims no ideas as its own. But there are many who pride themselves, even base their self-esteem, on being open-minded when in fact they may lack the courage to take a stand. Whoever said that a mind should be open on both ends?
We aren’t being flexible when we bend or suspend our own beliefs in favor of every new idea that blows by. We aren’t being sophisticated when we listen without comment to ugly racist or sexist remarks. Judgment is a function of intelligence, and intelligence rejects as well as accepts.
Healthy openness means being willing to bounce new information off the body of information we’ve already tried and tested. No thinking adult is a blank slate. It’s entirely appropriate to set up sensible boundaries around our own values and beliefs. “Who says so?” and “How does this fit?” are good questions to ask when testing new input. As always, integrity is defended by making wise choices.
The object of open-mindedness is not to let the wind whistle between my ears.
April 10 A person who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. Words like control, master, and take charge appear again and again in literature that promotes self-esteem or any positive growth. These terms usually advise saddling some troubling emotion or putting a bit in the mouth of fear. When some impulse is running wild, we’re taught to rein it in.
But restraint is not the only purpose of inner control. Taking charge has more upbeat consequences as well. If we can subdue fear, then so can we conjure up pleasure. If this control can diminish the power others have over us, can it not stoke up the power we have over ourselves? Once we can direct our own inner dialogue, we also get to decide how much fun we will have and which adventures we will choose. When we choose what shall stay and what shall go, a whole new world opens up to us.
To be a “master” of anything seems like heavy work leading to heavy responsibility. And it is. But mastery is also rewarding. What could be better than designing our own delights?
Anyone who can be a dungeon master can also be a circus master.
April 11 Nostalgia is a seductive liar. Oh, for the good old days! In those long lost, golden times our self-esteem was sky high, life was sweet, and problems were few. If only we could return to the splendid days that were! Our lives would be just as happy and trouble-free as they used to be!
Hogwash. When we catch ourselves enshrining our yesterdays, we need to put on our glasses and take a clearer look backward. For all its remembered goodness, we will see that it was not all that good. We’ve forgotten all the hard knocks that won us the wisdom we have today. Forgotten, too, are the fears, jealousies, failures, and disappointments strewn among the glorious flowers of memory.
The days we have now are also good days. Flowers are growing. Music is playing. It’s a wonderful thing to have happy memories. But we live in today and it is today that awaits our pleasure.
Self-esteem must be remade afresh each day, in the here and now.
April 12 One must not always think that feeling is everything. When self-esteem is the topic, feelings usually are the gauge. That is, most of us are only aware of positive self-esteem when our feelings tell us we have it. Most often, we let how we feel control our sense of who we are and how we are.
It can be most helpful to remember that feelings only face backward; they can only reflect what was. As important as it is to be in touch with our feelings, we must not let our feelings get us in a stranglehold. It is equally important to keep our feelings from making decisions that need to be made by our heads.
Self-esteem, of course, is made up of many things, only one of which is how we feel. Suppose we are trying hard to stick up for ourselves to talk straight, to get started in a self-help group, open a savings account, or begin a weight-control program. But suppose we don’t feel comfortable with the new behavior or don’t feel like we are making enough progress. We know it’s good but it doesn’t feel good. The only thing to do at such a time is to keep right on moving the muscles. If self-esteem is to be a fact, it has to be more than just a feeling.
Feelings give me information, but rational thought must do the processing.
April 13 Togetherness is a substitute sense of community, a counterfeit communion. Some of us seek—no, demand—a suffocating degree of togetherness with the people we love best. Although we’re far too mannerly to open a door without knocking, we think nothing of barging in on the lives of our grown children, for example. Although we’d never snoop in someone’s purse, it never occurs to us that we’re invading our friends’ privacy when we insist that they “tell us everything.”
Those of us who like to talk about how “close” or “inseparable” we are with others need to check out our motives. Does the togetherness we insist on meet the needs of the others, or just our own? Are we binding them to us out of love—which is enslaving? Do we hold them so close because we love them so much, or because we feel so insecure and incomplete in ourselves?
Although we usually mean well, our trespassing on other people’s personal space may be causing them discomfort and grief. Let’s be very sure, before we latch on to others in a viselike grip of closeness, that their idea of loving behavior is the same as ours.
Even the “closest” people need spaces in their togetherness.
April 14 Those who know the least of others think the highest of themselves. Those of us who aren’t vulnerable to chemical addictions often secretly feel superior to those of us who are. Although we’re reluctant to admit it, we wrinkle our noses, raise our eyebrows, and shiver in genteel disgust at the addict’s blatant loss of control. “Thank God it isn’t me,” we say in our heart of hearts as we tiptoe around the drunk slumped on the street, “I’ve got my problems, but at least they aren’t that bad!”
Yet are we really so different? But for chemical invulnerability—an unmerited gift of fate—are we really better people? Are we as free as we think we are of ugliness and self-degradation? Do some of our toxic thoughts and behaviors not have a poisonous effect on ourselves and the people around us? Is sick in private so different from sick in public?
What of the vicious gossip? The remorseless liar? The selfishly indifferent parent? What of our compulsive eating or shopping or faultfinding? The fact is that chemical addiction is only one way to erode integrity; there are many others and most of us are familiar with them. There are more similarities than differences between us and our chemically addicted brothers and sisters.
Among the halt and the lame, there is little rationale for a sense of superiority.
April 15 Forewarned is forearmed. Many victims of depression, when searching for clues and patterns, find that their ailment is cyclical. For whatever reasons, at certain times of year, their spirits plummet to the ground like downed birds. Perhaps it’s the anniversary of a parent’s death, a business failure, or another sad time. Or perhaps it’s related to the amount of sunlight available, or biorhythms, or brain chemistry.
Recognizing a predictable pattern can make a real difference. The ability to anticipate anything always puts a few more cards in our hand. It may not prevent the depression, but at least we won’t be caught off guard.
If we know what’s coming up, appropriate steps may be taken. Important appointments may be made for a later date, significant decisions may be worked out ahead of time or put off, perhaps something as simple as hiring more baby-sitting so we can have more free time may assist us in feeling better during a bad time.
When I fight against depression, I fight for self-esteem.
April 16 Becoming ill is the price you pay for driving yourself too hard. Low self-esteem doesn’t always show itself as cringing passivity. Many overachievers are hounded by the need, rooted in low self-esteem, to push themselves beyond any reasonable effort. Even in recovery, such people may nearly drive themselves to ruin by relentlessly practicing slowing down, taking it easy, and learning to enjoy. They work so hard at finding some enjoyment they get too tired to have any fun at all!
How can we learn to honor a self we’re already abusing? If we were racehorse owners, we wouldn’t dream of pushing our valuable animals so hard. “How much did you get accomplished?” is the wrong question for us. Instead, we should ask ourselves if we have hugged a friend, taken a walk, read a novel, or told a joke.
There is neither virtue nor valor in driving ourselves until we are ill. Utter exhaustion is the enemy of health and of self-esteem as well. We need to give ourselves at least as much consideration and care as we’d give a horse.
I deserve to relax and have fun.
April 17 The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. The search for greater self-knowledge is much like an archaeological dig. The farther down we go, the more surprises we’re likely to find. Some are more fun than others. Often, one of our less-pleasing discoveries is our skill in using acceptable words to name our unacceptable character flaws.
The quality we used to call perseverance, for example, may turn out to be plain old stubbornness once we clean it off and take a good look. Our compassion and generosity may look an awful lot like codependent enabling and our straightforwardness, like crass insensitivity. Of course, we realized we had flaws, but who guessed they would be so serious-or that so many of them would be the so-called “virtues” that we were proud of!
But we shouldn’t be too discouraged by our character flaws. They’re not evidence of our depravity, but of our humanity. Even the spiritual giants of this world are not perfect. Flawlessness is not a condition that applies to human beings. To identify a character flaw is like naming a disease after the lab results come in. The lab report doesn’t cause the disease. It simply tells what it is, so a remedy can be prescribed.
I have to know what’s hurting me if I want to fix it.
April 18 Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. The old saying “Once burned, twice shy” doesn’t tell the half of it. Some of us burn victims resolve that we’ll never go near another fire for the rest of our lives. Rather than risk another scorching, we turn our backs on the warmth, the light, and the merry companionship offered by a blazing campfire on a chilly night.
We are victims of love gone wrong. Unlike others who wipe away their tears and go back to the party, we weren’t just disappointed, but devastated, not just wounded, but mortally wounded. Our blood, when we were pierced by rejection, ran redder than anyone else’s blood, our pain was more painful. So how could we be expected to take another chance, to try again?
Yet the fear of hurt can hurt us more than anything. And if we avoid injury by sitting on the bench, we miss out on the game. If a relationship crumbled in spite of our best efforts, then that relationship wasn’t meant to be. A better possibility is out there waiting for us. But we’ll only have the chance of finding it if we take off our bandages and get back in the game.
I am a lot more resilient than I think I am.
April 19 Be careful not to test the water with both feet. To put yourself in a lose-lose situation is to lose for sure. And when you lose often enough, self-esteem erodes. In striving for self-confidence, it is as important to know what not to do as what to do.
Many situations that look good on the surface may not really be good at all. Learning to test cautiously a situation, relationship, or new venture so as to minimize risk is a critical part of building self-esteem. Just because a proposition or a person looks good or sounds good does not mean he/she/it is genuine. We need to test it out without totally exposing ourselves before making a commitment. There’s no insult in that to the other; sincerity is always subject to proof.
If mere words were facts, thousands of broke hustlers would be millionaires. Many are those who can make any deal sound too good to pass up. But the rosy picture can look quite different beneath the surface. It’s just good sense to take your time, get references, check track records, before investing more than you can afford to lose.
A toe in the water before the headlong plunge will help me achieve and maintain my self-esteem.
April 20 We are alive, and that is the only place we need to be to start. Our needs are much simpler than our wants. We may want perfect flying weather and a detailed flight plan, but insistence on ideal conditions may make the difference between staying or going. All we really need to take off is to be alive.
No one is too beaten down, too old, or too anything else to begin a self-improvement program. Willingness, and willingness alone, is the total price of the ticket. The next thing to do is to get rid of excess baggage-like the notion that this or that condition must be met before we begin. Once we take responsibility for where we are and who we are, the only thing left is here we are! Where else do we need to be?
Change is about process, and the improvement process has much more to do with our direction than our starting place. If we’re starting at 10 and going for 100, or if we’re starting at 1,000 and shooting for the stratosphere, we’re still in process. It is the same infinite journey for all of us. On this side of the grave, there never will be a time when the journey toward completion is over. And that’s not because we’re so broken-it’s because the possibilities are so great.
Starting is all there is, so here I go!
April 21 Nobody expects to find comfort and companionability in reformers. When we can’t find a perfect mate, some of us try to make one. The recipe is simple, isn’t it? All you need is a diamond in the rough and a lot of elbow grease. Then it’s just a matter of polish, polish, polish! When we first start out on such a project it seems so sensible, so doable, and well-so good of us to go to so much trouble for somebody else!
But another person can’t be a “project” any more than he or she can be a pet. No healthy relationship ever starts out as a salvage operation. We may say, “I just want what’s best for you,” yet when we try to re-create someone in our own image of perfection, we’re violating that person’s integrity-and our own as well. Eventually, although they may go along with our meddling at first, our human projects get tired of our one-upmanship; they end up feeling resentful and we end up feeling unappreciated.
Healthy self-esteem demands that we accept ourselves and other people for what they are. We don’t have the right to bully people into changing their habits and styles. To do so in the name of love demeans them, us, and the concept of love itself.
I’m not God and other people aren’t lumps of clay that need shaping up.
April 22 Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. As much as we hear workaholism decried, we hear even more compelling voices telling us that the fast track is the only place to be if we’ve got the right stuff to make it to the top. No pain, no gain is the motto that drives us to work through lunch. Go all out! Is the battle cry that pushes us to produce by moonlight. To secure our place on the winning team, we may become afraid even to take a day off.
But constant work is as abnormal as constant sleep. Whatever the lopsided benefit, we violate our physical and spiritual need for rhythm, for ebb and flow, when we use up all our energy in one area of our lives. We deny human nature when we deny ourselves the rest and recreation we need to replenish our resources. And natural consequences occur when we deny human nature.
Exhaustion and emptiness are the inevitable result of chronic overwork. Any version of success that requires such dues is a counterfeit of the real thing. Shiny and seductive as the payoff may seem, dedication shouldn’t cost us every waking moment. If it does, we need to think again about what makes a successful life. We need to stop looking for gold down there in the salt mines.
Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
April 23 The avenues in my neighborhood are Pride, Covetousness, and Lust; the cross streets are Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. I live over on Sloth, and the style on our street is to avoid the other thoroughfares. What do you think? Some of us have created a lot of awful messes through the years. We’ve committed some big, juicy sins that fill us with remorse and regret. Others of us have stayed out of trouble and kept our noses clean. Our records aren’t full of black spots, but then they’re not very full of anything. We haven’t done much wrong because we haven’t done much. Which of us is better off?
Both of us have work to do if we want to get more out of the future than we did out of the past. If we’ve done damage, our obvious task is to make whatever repairs we can, forgive ourselves, and start walking a straighter path. If we’ve hidden out in passive inactivity, venturing little and gaining less, we need to get out of the stands and onto the field. There’s no virtue or joy in being a spectator of the game of life.
We can ruin our lives by omission as well as commission. What we don’t do can often cause us more regret, in the long run, than the mistakes we make. Better to risk a wrong turn than to sit out our lives.
If I hang back, I will lose out.
April 24 Upon deciding, be quick to act. Some gaps on the road can seem too broad for leaping. But if we can’t get across them, we’re stuck. All forward motion comes to a halt, and the journey toward self-realization is over. One of these gaps is the cavern that stands between decision and action.
After making a decision, a person is different. Whether you have decided to stay or leave, start or stop, risk or conserve, you have opted for change. Mentally, you have already done it. To fail to act on a well-considered decision is to invite confusion, double messages, and emotional chaos. With the loss of will, integrity is also lost.
Sometimes, because we’re afraid to act, we won’t even admit that, deep down, we’ve already made a decision. Perhaps, for example, we’ve completely withdrawn our spirits from a hated job or a dead marriage. By denying that we’ve already pulled out, we deny our own truth. This denial not only devastates our self-esteem, but it widens the gap between where we are now and our next destination. Sooner or later we’re going to have to take the leap. Why not sooner?
Once made, an important decision will cause me trouble until I act on it.
April 25 What I’m dealing with is bad enough. I can’t deal with worse right now. Sometimes rallying cries like “Now or never!” are worse than useless. This is so when the situation we’re facing is already, in its present form, draining every bit of energy we have. At this point to say, “All or nothing!” is to guarantee nothing.
Even well-intentioned friends may push us into thinking that some terribly difficult action must be launched right now. They may insist that we launch a mighty initiative, ready for not, for our own good. But only we can judge our own readiness or our own good.
The woman quoted above was telling her group that she was doing the best she could-today-with her chemically dependent son. She knew there was a crisis coming, that she would have to tell her boy he couldn’t continue to use drugs and live under her roof at the same time. But that crisis was a “worse” she couldn’t handle today. Right now it was all she could do to get to her meetings, build up her strength, and pray. She was wise to know that it’s better not to shout “Do or die!” before you’re ready to do.
Getting ready may be half the battle.
April 26 Nobody ever went to his deathbed wishing he’d spent more time at the office. Writing your own epitaph is a thought-provoking exercise at some personal growth workshops. What should our tombstones say? How do we want to be remembered? What mattered most to us in life? What legitimate claim can we make of our contribution to the world?
Participants in this exercise often begin with uneasy laughter and then start coming up with ways they would not like to be remembered. “Here lies Carla,” one woman said in a flash of amused self-awareness, “she meant well.” After that icebreaker, several others chipped in their own revealing self-characterizations. “He never missed a day of work,” one man said with nearly as much pride as gentle self-mockery. More than a few people nodded and smiled in self-recognition.
The balance between work and play is crucial to our well-being. If we want our full share of joy in life, if we mean to honor the balanced values we profess, we would do well to meditate now rather than later on the legends we live by.
What do I most want to do or be before I run out of days?
April 27 The past is smoke. When necessary, blow it away. It has often been said that our perceptions are like glasses that, once in place, affect and color all we see. That vision, of course, becomes our reality, our truth. But it is important to realize that most of our perceptions were forged in a fire that is now history. A fire long grown cold. What happened, happened, it can never be undone. However, there is no need to drag it through each day of our present life.
Most obstacles to enjoying a positive, gentile self-image are due to the negative lessons we learned long ago. Those lessons reinforce perfectionism; passivity; fear of intimacy; or feelings of unworthiness, love, or happiness. These are lessons of the past. As such, they are smoke. Not real anymore unless we allow them to be real.
Many a brave soul, trudging toward a better tomorrow, has come to learn how to deal with a “shame attack.” That means recognizing that it is a flashback that can either blow away like dandelion seeds or take root in the present. We are the ones who must decide whether the power of the past will grow or go.
I can allow the ugly past to blow away. All it takes is the desire and the effort to let it go.
April 28 Friendships, like marriage, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. Everybody knows that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But perhaps we don’t stop to consider how important this homely bit of folk wisdom may be to our personal relationships. Some words simply must never be spoken; some situations must never be allowed to occur. Our treasured relationships are just too valuable to handle carelessly.
Nothing is worth the unforgivable insult or betrayal. Far better for us to appear the coward and walk out the door if a confrontation is going out of control. Far wiser to shoot ourselves in the foot rather than pierce a friend’s soft underbelly with an unhealable wound.
Occasional strain and friction are inevitable in any relationship. But we need loving relationships with our friends to support our self-esteem. When there is conflict, we may need to withdraw to protect their self-esteem as well as our own. At a later time, when tempers and tensions have cooled, we will both be glad of the self-restraint.
Sometimes retreat is the only way to win.
April 29 To know one’s self, one should assert one’s self. There are times when a feeling of insignificance assails us. Very often this is a false perception that needs to be quickly banished. The truth is that we are more important than we sometimes think we are.
There is no reason not to be proud of the constructive things we have done. It is a mistake to minimize the successful completion of a task, the learning of a new skill, a good habit strengthened or a bad habit eliminated. Most of us have many, many worthwhile accomplishments, great and small, to feel good about. We are more worthwhile and attractive than we sometimes realize.
It often helps to advertise our achievements a bit, instead of always being so frank about our failures. This can be done without boasting. An honest recital of an accomplishment or a mention of a skill shows healthy self-esteem. It is not being “modest” when we shy away from asserting ourselves. We can’t expect other people to continually reassure us of our worth if we’re not willing to speak up for ourselves.
There’s nothing wrong with tooting my own horn once in a while.
April 30 Two things are bad for the heart-running uphill and running down people. Trashing others as a “harmless” form of amusement is a nasty habit. But it’s common enough to prop ourselves up by putting other people down. No doubt it’s the major sport in most workplaces. Unfortunately, people bashing is a sport that injures the self-esteem of everyone who plays it.
This is so for a couple of reasons. The first is the psychological axiom that the mind always moves toward its dominant thought. To run down people, we must first stoke our minds with negative thoughts. Those thoughts are then translated into cutting words. But the very act of inviting and hosting negative thoughts cuts into ourselves first. Before we even say a word, we’ve done damage.
The second reason we are hurt when we run people down is that we weaken any possibility of forming a bond of community with them. Self-esteem is based on membership in a community of some sort. It’s fostered by people who care. People we can count on. People whose smiles tell us they are glad to see us. Habitually running people down makes us poor untrustworthy candidates for membership in such a community.
Far better for health, mental as well as spiritual, to grow from the exercise of lifting other up!
Healthy people don’t make sport of other people’s flaws.
