Majoring in the Minors

What is life?

Is it the daily routine or the adventure?  The whole "Working for the weekend" idea is the reality we endure in our culture.  When we talk about life, our memories gravitate to our adventures, misadventures and places we have been, chances we took.  Yes, those are our "glory days".  It has me wondering if travel IS life and our daily routine is how most of us define comfort and stability.

Never in the history of man have we been so mobile, yet most of us cling to a small bubble of a world.  When we leave that bubble, it is an adventure.  We learn, grow, and experience things in the Bigger World.  Travel changes us, and it need not be to the other side of the world but then again, why not?  I think our country would be a better place if everyone were able to visit a 3rd world country for a week.  To see that not everyone lives like us and has what we take for granted, and yet they are happy.  To see that there is suffering that we never considered, social norms that we never conceived, craftsmanship untold, food we have never tasted and beauty we have never seen in the midst of it all- that is profound learning.

So is life learning or existing?  Adventure or station-keeping?

Have I spent my life majoring in the minors?

Brilliant Will Durant Quotes

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.”

“It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment.”

“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

“I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun.”

“No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.”

Glennon Doyle Melton Quotes

  From Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed and  Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life

“Life is hard—not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”

“When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. they are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate.” 

“The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.” 

“You have been offered "the gift of crisis". As Kathleen Norris reminds us, the Greek root of the word crisis is "to sift", as in, to shake out the excesses and leave only what's important. That's what crises do. They shake things up until we are forced to hold on to only what matters most. The rest falls away.” 

“The sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you've been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders- the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun, but it wont take you personally. It´ll never, ever punish you for hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades, and when you finally step outside, it´ll be there.” 

“That’s how you can tell that you’re filling yourself with the wrong things. You use a lot of energy, and in the end, you feel emptier and less comfortable than ever.” 

“If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world that no one else can offer: yourself.” 

“God approaches us in the disguise of other people.” 

“What is to give light must endure burning.” —Viktor E. Frankl

“Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.” 

“When they speak to you from their fear--speak past their fear and directly to their love. Their Love will step forward eventually.” 

“Wherever you go, there you are. Your emptiness goes with you. Maddening. Things that help: writing, reading, water, walks, forgiving myself every other minute, practicing easy yoga, taking deep breaths, and petting my dogs. These things don't fill me completely, but they remind me that it is not my job to fill myself. It's just my job to notice my emptiness and find graceful ways to live as a broken, unfilled human... 

If there's a silver lining to the emptiness, here it is: the unfillable is what brings people together. I've never made a friend by bragging about my strengths, but I've made countless by sharing my weakness and my emptiness.” 

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

“Persevere. Bear with great patience each other’s infirmities of body or behavior. And when the thorns of contention arise, daily forgive, and be ready to accept forgiveness.” 

“I think one of the keys to happiness is accepting that I am never going to be perfectly happy. Life is uncomfortable. So I might as well get busy loving the people around me. I’m going to stop trying so hard to decide whether they are the “right people” for me and just take deep breaths and love my neighbors. I’m going to take care of my friends. I’m going to find peace in the ’burbs. I’m going to quit chasing happiness long enough to notice it smiling right at me.” 

“Reading is my inhale and writing is my exhale.” 

“I am a child of God, and so is everyone else. We are all on the same side. And so in each new person, I see an invitation to know a new side of God. There are as many sides of him as there are people walking the earth. I think that’s why he keeps making people. He’s not done telling us about himself yet. So I remember that each person I meet or hear from, even if she’s not yet treating me the way I’d like to be treated, is the most important thing on earth. There is no hierarchy of importance, of brilliance. We are each infinity important. More brilliant than the sun. Because each of us is a child of God. So we better recognize. Those are the two sides of the golden coin I’d like each of my children to keep in her pocket forever: Be confident because you are a child of God. Be humble because everyone else is too.” 

“Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us.” 

“Why does it have to hurt? Why does it have to be hard?” Tish asked me. “You know how math is your hardest class right now, but it’s also where you’re learning the most?” I explained. “It’s like that. Life is about learning, and we learn best when things get hard.” 

“I don’t want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything that I don’t have to. I want to travel light.” 

"Different always turns out to be an illusion."

“I love God, whoever he is, and I’d really like to get closer to him. I’ve been thinking about how one of the simplest ways to get close to a woman is to be good to her children. To be kind and gentle and to pay close attention to the things that make them special. To try to see her children the way she sees her children. And how God made us in his image. How he is the mother and father of all of us. So I wonder if that would be the best way to get closer to him too. By being kind and gentle to his children and noticing all of the things that make them special. So many of us spend our time trying to find God in books, but maybe the simplest way to God is directly through the hearts of his children.” 

“Let’s be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father’s behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches’ home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that “it ain’t time to worry yet.” We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they’ll say, “Huh. Guess it’s not time to worry yet.” 

“I thought a lot about how beautiful and powerful courage and faith are when they are found together.” 

“You can never get enough of what you don’t need.” 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." —Howard Thurman

“I don't believe in advice. Everybody has the answers right inside her, since we're all made up of the same amount of God. So when a friend says, I need some advice, I switch it to, I need some love, and I try to offer that.” 

“I think God puts people in our lives as gifts to us. The children in your class this year, they are some of God's gifts to you. So please treat each one like a gift from God. Every single one.” 

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it." —Robert Fulghum 

“Holes are good for making friends, and friends are the best fillers I’ve found yet. Maybe because other people are the closest we get to God on this side. So when we use them to find God in each other, we become holy.” 

“There are two different types of time. Chronos time is what we live in. It’s regular time. It’s one minute at a time, staring down the clock until bedtime time. It’s ten excruciating minutes in the Target line time, four screaming minutes in time-out time, two hours until Daddy gets home time. Chronos is the hard, slow-passing time we parents often live in. Then there’s Kairos time. Kairos is God’s time. It’s time outside of time. It’s metaphysical time. Kairos is those magical moments in which time stands still. I have a few of those moments each day, and I cherish them.” 

The Way of Being Lost

Cutting Loose

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path — but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

—William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

5 x 5 Method

Unseen Things

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  ~Hebrews 11:1

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.  ~2 Corinthians 4:18

Reboot

In the past week, two people have told me that they are leaving behind the world of self-employment and being their own boss.  In both cases, the combination of stress and lack of financial payoff were causing them to abandon their dreams or at least back-burner them for an indefinite length of time.

The cost of those dreams can outweigh the benefits.  The stress alone can kill you.  Tasks you thought you could manage alone get too time consuming to manage alone.  People can let you down.  Clients can be unreasonable.  Communication becomes a chore.  Everything takes longer than you thought and "setting your own schedule" becomes working 24/7.  Personal finances and business finances can get blurred.  It is rare that a body can juggle all that without incident.  Life IS surprises.  Life is all about plan B.  

The skill you love to do must be balanced with self-promotion and professional development.

And on and on...

So it is time for a reboot.

Unnecessary definition: That is computer vernacular for shutting down and starting over.  Information and programs get a fresh start up, a new running of the commands that make them perform- updates and deletions get reshuffled.  Inexplicable ghosts in the machine can be ironed out.  Sometimes that is just the trick.

Except this time it's your life.

You have more invested in that.  It feels catastrophic.  It feels like a failure.  Humbling...no, humiliating.

Yet on the other side of the reboot there is hope.  Realignment.  Restoration.  It could take time before you find 'normal" again.  You might never regain the same boldness that led you off on the road less traveled, or you might, depending on how you process the journey.  You have unlimited reboots, you don't have unlimited time.

Like a Shepherd

A shepherd (or a pastor) is a being who exists to gather the flock.  He is not the charismatic one, or the ultra gifted one.  He has a sensitivity for the lost, the broken, the lonely.  He is not the public speaker or the one at the center of attention- the vision-caster:  he is the wounded healer, the one with his eye toward the person on the fringe.  He sees the potential and longs to see it encouraged and fulfilled.  I keep saying "he" but it is just as likely to be a "she".  She is the person who remembers to pray, to send a note, to ask about what is happening since you last talked.  Walking like a shepherd is a calling.

Let Life Be An Adventure

"Quit living as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death. Set God-sized goals. Pursue God ordained passions. Go after a dream that is destined to fail without divine intervention. Keep asking questions. Keep making mistakes. Keep seeking God. Stop pointing out problems and become part of the solution. Stop repeating the past and start creating the future. Stop playing it safe and start taking risks. Expand your horizons. Accumulate experiences. Enjoy the journey." -Mark Batterson

I remember stumbling upon a nugget as I read "Your Money or Your Life" by  Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez some years ago: "Some people in striving to make a living, forget to live.  They are, in truth, making a dying."

Lately, I have developed a desire to travel the world.  My wife and I have become fans of the travel shows introducing us to far away lands and stoked a wanderlust to explore and experience our world, different cultures and abandon our safe little bubble.  This is new.  I have had a below average curiosity for travel, it just seemed so frivolous.  Now I sense an adventure and growth to be had out there.

We are discovering new gifts that we wish to use and they allow us mobility; for myself it is writing, for my wife, it is photography.  For both of us, ministry and serving others is drawing us out as well.

It is one thing to be talking and dreaming about adventures, it is quite another to hop over the back fence with a knapsack and kick off like a vagabond, taking the journey literally.  Time will tell if wanderlust become real travel or just a mild case of tourism.

A Normal Life

Look into her eyes for a moment.  Look for her soul.  Can you see the pain?  Can you imagine her day at school?  Can you hear her asking "Why me, God?"

I feel bad for people who have skin conditions, burn scars, birthmarks, odd body shapes, deformities, etc. Because no matter what the character of the human being we all naturally flinch inwardly, react badly, and feel uncomfortable around them, and make a judgement based on appearances. I don't know if it can be helped, frankly, and I know that they can pick that up (I pick up attitudes and judgements people make about my weight). It makes no difference how many times others say, "Oh beauty is on the inside" -but if we are honest, we must admit that how people respond to us (involuntarily or not) has an impact on our image, value and eventually on our character (as we learn to cope with the rejection). It is something like the saying, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me," which is totally false. No matter how bold a face we put on it, most of us would rather be stoned to death than endure the cumulative effects of unkind words we have suffered in this life.

Let's face it. Unless you are physically standard (not making others uncomfortable) you will be bullied, made to feel ugly, awkward and in general, made to feel unwelcomed. It doesn't matter if the message comes from a the barrage of beautiful people in the media or from the annoying kid who sits behind you on the school bus. No amount of repeating "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" can undo the suffering that one endures mentally and that makes them an easy mark for someone looking to score a laugh at other's expense. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everyone look "normal" so they could live a less painful life.  I wish I could change that human shallowness that has us treat some people as less worthy because of exterior factors.

I hope someday medical technology will allow and humanity will realize that no one should have to suffer that anguish.

Greater Than/Less Than = Equality

Our Constitution claims that all men are created equal.  I am going to push back on that a bit and say that all people are NOT created equal. A woman is not as physically strong as a man, A beautiful person is always given preferential treatment over an ugly person, a fit person is preferred over a fat person, Culture and race can create inequality because of different values and morals, physical strengths and weaknesses. susceptibility to illnesses   We are not all born into ideal situations, not all of our parents value education the same,  If everyone was created equal, everyone would get A's in math, science and language arts in school.  For some people living seems to come easy for them.  For others, life is a constant struggle.  We are all equally dependent on others, whether we admit it or not.yet our efforts to level the playing field often miss the mark.  It has been said that, "There is nothing more unequal that our equal treatment of unequal people."


I see efforts to lift others up as decent, courteous, kind and in every man's best interest.  It's not someone else's right to get something from me because they lack it, but if it is in my power to help someone and I don't, then what kind of person am I?
I am not suggesting that everyone has the same meal, the same car, the same house, but that everyone has the opportunity to earn those things.  That everyone has the chance to eat nutritional food and drink clean water and have access to medical care and the freedom to own a home and work a job and benefit from the toil of their own hands.  Justice cannot occur without freedom, so the first step is to ensure that all people have freedom.  Opportunity and peace will follow when freedom brings justice.

Justice is not something that comes from laws and governments, it must come from our hearts.  Rules cannot change the heart.  Selfish hearts cannot bring around equality.  We must love justice enough to lift up one another.  When one person is lifted up all of humanity is lifted up.

Integrity looks like

Maybe it is a midlife crisis, maybe it is traveling an old familiar road and encountering the remains of a few burned bridges, but I find myself examining my life and realizing my actions have not always aligned with my beliefs or my words.  Integrity, like trust, it is a difficult fence to mend.  Integrity is a consistent pattern of ethical actions based on a observable moral code.  The only way to fix inconsistency is with a new track record of honest and habitual behavior that shows you have made a change- that takes time.  Failure in integrity comes when we take short-cuts, show preferential treatment (usually to ourselves) and employ situational ethics to justify avoiding a hard decision.

It takes wisdom to walk away from a temptation.  It takes courage to do the right thing and say no to the easy short-cut.  There is dignity if we will stick to our values and let our life speak that we know who we are in honest integrity.

Image Management

I wish politicians could see how transparent their efforts are to everyone watching

But then, they aren't the only ones trying to manage how others see them, are they?

All of our lies, all of our character assassination is centered on the hopes that it will make us look better, to spin or justify ourselves.  We do this so regularly that it has become a part of our national character.  It is the way of political discourse, the basis for "gotcha journalism", it is part and parcel of advertising, common practice of ladder-climbers in the business world.  More personally, we do this through the way we manicure our lawns, how we dress and the car we choose to drive. The blame, excuses and outright sales job that massages our opinions only fool some of the people some of the time- mostly those who WANT to believe what they are being told.

We make victims of ourselves by denying our shortcomings, blaming others and/or resorting to verbal arsonism to tear down others.  We are not morally tall enough to stand on our own feet so we stand on the backs of whoever may be convenient.

Integrity means that our thoughts, our words and our actions are in alignment with each other.  If you feel guilt as you read this, as I do, that is an acknowledgement that our hands are not clean and we have chose image management over honesty.  To clear our conscious, we can make a list of any offenses we remember and write how to handle it honestly next time.  To make amends we should go to who we offended and confess, ask forgiveness and make amends as much as possible.

Letting the facts speak for themselves requires maturity.  Angling for a position that makes you look good at the another's expense costs us our self-respect and makes us appear desperate.

Integrity

Living true to yourself is living with integrity, that means your thoughts, words and actions are in harmony with each other.  Not that you live by some unteachable spirit, but when your thoughts and beliefs change, your words and most importantly, your actions change to match.

It is easy to think a thought to recognize an idea as noble, and it is easy to espouse an ideal, people do this all the time.  The TEST comes in applying the thoughts and words in action.

One can rant about the government or place of employment at will but when it comes to producing change: will we act?  Will we go beyond our words by running for office or leading a protest?  Would we sacrifice our security by talking to our boss- or even quitting?

Yet this is the essence of integrity.  It starts by thinking honorable and right thoughts.  Left to my own devices, these would be ultimately selfish thoughts.  Because of my faith, I have guidelines laid out by God to give me a plumbline.  I can see that His thoughts are higher than my thoughts and his ways higher than my ways through the narrative of the Bible.  I don't understand much of it, but the parts I do understand are enough to keep me busy the rest of my life.

I have an over-developed sense of justice that borderlines on desire to see things be "fair" (or at least my idea of fair).  In the small short view of a human, that is bound to make me dissatisfied.  I "major in the minors" like politics, materialism, career, building a legacy for myself.  I rant quite a bit about these things when others seem to be working against me (Yes, even God).  So integrity starts in choosing my direction and my battles.  Over-arching themes of faith, simplicity, service, truth, and a belief that something of God lives in all of us, this creates a cognitive structure or ideal, that encapsulates our life scheme.  We already have one of these we have developed over the years, but the components can sometimes conflict (e.g. we believe all life is sacred, but we also carry a gun for protection, or believe in abortion as a right).  These conflicts create tension or cognitive dissonance in our mind which we work to justify using mental gymnastics.  First our thoughts must co-exist peacefully before they become words.

Our words, they are many, and more than our actions, which is a problem.  I sometimes allow my words to compose my thoughts (putting the cart before the horse, so to speak).  Oh, we do love to hear ourselves speak!  At times we can barely wait for another to stop speaking so we can unleash our words.  Often we turn the subject towards ourselves- check yourself in this- you might be surprised.  Our words want to direct us in selfish ways- "out of the heart the mouth speaks" and our heart is often all about us.

The courage to act is the true test of all our thoughts and words.

The Four Agreements

Make Peace With Who You Are

There is a direct relationship between guilt, shame and self-worth. It is widely known that guilt is when we feel bad about something we did, while shame is when we feel bad about ourselves. Either way, when we carry a burden of guilt or shame, we invariably have low self-esteem. This sense of low or no self-worth leads to many self-imposed problems and this opens a plethora of self-destructive emotions. In essence, we turn on ourselves like a ravaging disease.

At some point in our lives, each one of us has no doubt observed this notable and undeniable truth: nobody ever seems to feel good enough about themselves. We are too fat, too thin; we don’t like our nose, our chin, our hair, our behind; and so the shame list goes on and on without end. We incessantly torment ourselves over whatever it is that we don’t like. Further, we associate whatever it is that we don't like with our self-worth. In our minds, as long as this "something" exists, we are somehow just not good enough—we carry a more damaging form of guilt called shame, and the effects are the same—self-destructive.

When will we begin to appreciate our own uniqueness?  Whenever we compare ourselves physically with others in an unfavorable way, we cheat ourselves out of our own individuality. The media would have us believe that we must be in style with the latest fad. But is it really written somewhere that we must all look alike? or dress alike? or act alike? Very likely, the only place it is written is in our minds.

Rather than put ourselves down continually, we must work hard to concentrate on our positives, focusing on that which makes us unique and likable. We all have things that we would change if we could. Even people who we think have it all, don't. Nobody has it all because no one is perfect. We all realize this and yet continue to criticize and insult ourselves.

Change what you can change and accept the rest as a necessary part of your own unique humanity. Make peace with who you are.

I Am Not My Dad

Having kids reveals so much about yourself.  I honestly don't know who I would be without my sons.  God uses them constantly to teach me about myself.  I would like to think I was a great dad but I think I was just determined to not be My Dad and to allow God to teach me along the process.

I have struggled along the way with all the behaviors I saw modeled by my dad; anger, lies, blame, threats, drinking, smoking, verbal arson, violence, impatience, broken promises, stealing, cheating, bragging, grudges, disinterest, workaholism, never satisfied, never expressing love, adultery, abuse, talking his way out of responsibility, procrastinating, hoarding, and more.

Even with all that, he was not all bad- only mostly bad.  One would have to say I learned what NOT TO DO from my Dad.

So many times I would get after my sons and God would stop me mid-sentence-
"What are you thinking?"....
"Why don't you listen to me?"....
"Why do you keep making the same mistakes?"....
"Where did you learn that from?"....
"How many times do I have to tell you?"...

Each time God would show me something about myself and our relationship.  The relationship about a child and his Heavenly Father.  The Father who does not let you down, is ultimately patient, who disciplines for our good, who is with us always, who is faithful and keeps His word.

To that end I feel very sad for anyone who never has children.  There is a wealth of learning and self-discovery there that you cannot get any other way.

Augmented Selfishness

I remember a line from a Bill Cosby monologue, it was regarding a roommate in college thinking that alcohol accentuates his personality.  To which Cosby quips, "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"

We all have places in our soul, our maturity, where we are stuck on Selfish.  I have a whole pageful of annoying habits, quirks, and behaviors that I have identified that I would like to be rid of for good.  I am sure others that know me well could add another page to that list. 

One of my few shows I watch on TV is Big Bang Theory, which is about a group of highly intelligent, socially inept science nerds.  The total oblivion that the characters have to social cues is hilarious and the basis for the whole show. Perhaps it is so funny because we can relate, we just can't see it from inside our world.

Seeing ourselves are we truly are is complicated because we have created filtered lenses which we see the world and our place in it. I will dig there at a later time, right now let's focus on Selfish.  A friend tells me that when we bypass a lesson that we need to learn, circumstances appear, again and again, until we face that lesson and pass the test.  Let's say that the lesson is how to get along with others, or how to handle money or how to discipline your children; you know the subject is unavoidable yet we will blame others and take shortcuts never making a disciplined effort to address our shortcomings.  The pain will only increase for ourselves and the people around us until we are proactive in meeting our test. 

Step one in identifying selfishness is this, we need to lay bare our self-centric behavior.  Maybe you need an inventory of your shortcomings.  Not so you can flog yourself, but so that you can begin the work we would all rather avoid.

If you would be so vulnerable, perhaps after you have done your inventory, you might post a few things you discovered.  You might find you are not alone...

Resonate

Somewhere along life's road, you were redirected. This isn't where you were meant to be.  Yet your destiny and direction calls to you, striking a call to your soul that longs to bring you Home.  In spite of the choices and turns you have made, your authenticity calls you out, draws you back.  There is a resonance, a harmonic that sings in the world, looking for you to intone by becoming who you were created to be.  It waits for you to realize that there is no other you, there is no other who can do what you do the way you do it.  There is a perfect place that you were created to be.  Can you hear it?

We are all a bit peculiar, eccentric in our thinking and unique in the connections we make mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  We each have a few strengths and oh so many weaknesses yet we don't see that we are not independent despite our many weaknesses.  We run on pride and fear; wanting to be independent and fearful of being exposed as needy or deficient.  It makes for a lonely interior life, this fearful hiding and drive to be self-sufficient.  It requires so much effort that we overlook that ringing harmonic that seeks our pure tone, that is our authenticity.

Ah, but we can't back track or start over again.  We can only move in a linear fashion forward.  Some of us carry heavy baggage.  We will make it to our destination with courage and helping one another.

That Resonance may only be a distant sound to you as though it was echoing across a mountain range or pinging across the ocean, but it calls you.  You will not be whole until you find it's source and stand in it's full clear wave.

So here we stand, covered in that which is not you, imitating that which is someone else, listening to others tell you who you should be and what you need to be happy.  Like waking from a dream you crash to earth, aware that life is not but a dream, and discover how far your imagination has taken you from the truth.

See your authenticity as undressing yourself, casting off the expectations and image management, all the masks.  Tear down the facade that is your pride.  Stand naked without these things and take a hard look at yourself.  It is hard, I know; our weaknesses were well disguised.  But the next part is harder: allow others to see you naked- expose yourself to others who will walk with you.  Rebuilding and healing from your emaciation and nakedness to a healthier and wholly authentic you.

That is where we are going...