Winter, 2023
1/26/23 pm
Here is a definition: To see oneself rightly. To ascribe the appropriate amount of significance to one’s thoughts, actions, desires, abilities, and one’s self. To speak rightly about what one is and does. About what one aspires to and about what they have achieved.
This is much like a definition I once heard of the word humility.
Humility is to have a right view of one’s self.
I like that definition very much.
It also sounds a little bit like pride, though. Or rather, it sounds like what I imagine true pride is like. The healthy kind of pride that cares about quality of work. That cares about contributing important things to the world. In that sense, pride and humility are almost the same thing. If pride is a right understanding of a persons achievements and humility is a right view of self, then these two things seem very similar to me.
How does it benefit me to think this way? I can take pride in good work and humbly be a good worker. To take pride, I think in the truest sense, would be to not boast in my work. But rather, to let my work boast in itself. My good work does not become better when I tell people how good it is.
And to become better at a thing is not to become prideful. It is to admit that I am deficient in some way. To not learn at all. That is the absolute height of hubris. Lord, let me never reach that moment in my life.
1/29/23 am
At first I was in it. Down in it. Solid white lines tracing tears back from the corners of my eyes. We were one. It would have been quite impossible to hurt him or be hurt by him. He couldn’t hurt me any more than he could plot or re-plot his own course.
And then… I was floating up above. He, laid out cold and stiff below and before me. There I was, ejected from my seat secret agent style. His unyielding skin begging to grind me into pulp at first contact. He was a danger, but not an active one. He was never even conscious of the threat he posed to me and others like me. How could I fear some thing that didn’t even have the capacity of heart to hate me? Yet it is so. I fear the inanimate. I fear it all the time. The road. The ocean. Outer space. The cave I peered into yesterday evening. And here, too, I fear my very own life.
On those days when I float above it. When I look at more than my eyes can handle. When I try to order the things that I see and put all those pieces together, I cower and a shadow sets on my face. I see darkly.
But on those days when I am down in it. And I work through what comes next. And I work through what comes after that. On those days, I don’t know fear. I wouldn’t know what to fear even if it told me. When I become part of my own life, and active participant… the one living it, I become a river. Not battered by the stones and valleys and gullies that I flow through. But held by them. I’m held, and still I have the strength to affect my surroundings. To go a different way. To dig down deeper and become more of what I am.
Memories
2/26/23 am
Is the quality of a person’s character a result of that person’s actions or intentions?
I’m in a place right now where I used to think that intention was everything. Maybe that was just because I did a lot of poor work with great intentions. But it was good intentions that drove me into the ground.
That cannot be integrity. How am I to help people grow toward maturity and health if I cannot even lead myself that way? For that reason, I am learning to believe that my doing must be healthy if I am to have good character. Meaning, I must be able to be pleased with the quality of what I have done. Otherwise, It was not done with integrity.
But what about doing, only? If I do, but I have hate inside of me, or I do it with a chip on my shoulder and a grudge in my heart, then do I have integrity?
I’m not convinced that character could possibly be all one thing or all the other. I think the quality of one’s doing should marry the willingness and the desire of one’s heart. I believe that character means doing where and doing what will be the most beneficial. I believe that a person’s most well, and should be a thing that they enjoy. A thing that makes them come alive and feel the pleasure of God. And I think I believe that this Ayn Rand brand of “selfishness” is, indeed, good. It is a sign of good character. This quiet pursuit of a person’s purpose is character. It is integrity.