°
Self-sabotage gets attention. Passive-aggressive sabotage is the same thing. You do not let someone’s life go smoothly: you make yourself into a bump or barricade in the road of life.
We then rationalize not helping as "help": they need to learn (i.e., submit to me).
If we decide to help joyfully (rather than manipulate and protect), we can get the attention we crave, but in a positive sense over the long-term instead of the painful short-term tactics that further isolates us.
°
The price of excessive fun includes setup and execution, which is part of the fun.
However, the actual cost is the sober responsibility of reordering not only the physical but also the emotional and relational detritus strewn across the metaphorical yard.
°
In my family, we were taught that when people will not listen or change with you, you should take your better, wiser self away and play your own game your way. That’ll show em.
While this preserves your integrity, leaving becomes limiting. How do you learn to charm, disarm or dominate if your go-to move is running away?
Leaving isn’t a wrong move, but it is a crowbar, and it’s impossible to build a house with only demolition tools.
°
What is the relationship between comfort and cowardice?
It seems the trap of comfort provokes cowardice: doing the easy thing as a way to avoid doing the right thing.
There may be times when the easy thing is the right thing, but do not allow yourself to mistake the "feeling of ease" as a sign of a decision’s rightness.
°
Loss of purpose reduces the ability to think well of yourself. Once a vital goal is lost, every decision is reactive rather than proactive: we either defer indefinitely or attack ideas as enemies.
Another way to say it: When you lose where you are going, you lose who you are. You may retain power, but your decision-making is compromised and reactive, so the decisions of others move you.
°
We are creatures evolved from dirt, mere flawed organisms until our status is threatened, and then our ego angrily declares our self-importance.
We claim to do the work for money, except when we slip up or care too much, then it is all for others or for soul sustenance. We claim to be the romantic rogue and become the cutthroat mercenary with the next breath.
It is as if we don’t know and are frantically bouncing ideas off reality to see which one it will accept. We do anything to keep from looking within and either knowing or declaring we don’t know.
We consistently avoid honesty at all points.
°
Knowing what you care about is another way to keep events in perspective: everything else falls away when you have one shiny goal. Truly knowing your purpose does not mean harmonization and balance but passionate pursuit and upheaval in your life as you bend your heart towards your desire.
°
We all primarily want certainty until we have it. Then, bored out of your mind, you start disrupting your stability.
Uncertainty, mystery, and danger are the spice of life.
Much like a child learning to explore, we constantly gravitate back home for safety, build up our courage, and go adventuring again.
°
Motion, that is, movement or locomotion, is necessary to perceive our environment. Thinking evolved from mapping out space: finding what the environment affords and pursuing goals based on your previous location.
The reversal is when we think we move: if anxious or neurotic, we compulsively fidget.
We are (mostly) not coerced to move for survival. Instead, we have internalized the threat of expulsion and channeled it into ambitious energy, productivity, and discontent… often marked by a compulsive twitchiness.
°
As a somewhat intelligent individual, I am better at excuse-making and ad-hoc explanations than I am overcoming.
