The Inner Struggle

Dave Navarro. Photo by the noh8campaing.

All the problems of the world can be credited to one single emotion: fear. It's what motivates us to hate things or avoid things. It dictates our actions, often wrong actions. But the thing is, fear is honest. It may be misinformed, but it's honest. We trust our fear, and rightly so. It can save our lives. But we do wrong when we let it control us and limit us.

The only thing in the world that can stop fear in its tracks is love. Every good thing we do is generated from it. That's where we get our empathy, our compassion, our charity. Love is what runs into a burning building even though it might kill us. Love beats fear down if you have enough of it.

There is an old story, usually cited as a Native American parable of sorts, that says each of us has two wolves inside us. We have the bad wolf that kills and terrorizes, and the good wolf that protects its brothers and loves its pack. And these wolves are always in battle with each other. Which one wins? The one you feed.

Too many people are feeding the bad wolf. They feed it with political arguments, religious  arguments. They feed it by focusing on the few differences we have instead of the many sames we have. They feed their fear until all they can think of is hating people, and ultimately it drives them to do wrong and unfair things.

Feed your love. And stop looking at that wolf in other people that gives you fear. Their wolf may be your brother and you don't even know it.

Dang, it's been a while.

I can't believe it has been more than two years since I made a post. How have you lived without me?

Well, I've been busy. I lot of stuff has happened in the past two years. I got divorced, so that was a pretty big deal. But it's OK, apart from the being poor and working at a crappy job part of it. Maybe that will get better soon too.

I've been in love with someone, but that's never going to work out. He can't make up his mind about stuff. And I thought women were supposed to be the indecisive ones? Regardless, I enjoyed it while it lasted. And honestly, I don't know if I could have made it through the last year without it, so I have no regrets.

My son is doing well, mostly. He's pretty lazy, so that's a problem, but he has a good heart and a great imagination and a strong sense of fairness and honor.

Where does this all leave me? I could be in worse shape. But I'm at a strange place in life and not exactly sure what my next step is. I left a long marriage and a reasonably secure identity, and then realized that identity had been false for almost the whole time. I've spent a lot of years doing what other people expect out of me and trying to live up to this or that standard, and now that I'm free to do whatever I want...I have no idea where to start. So it's a new adventure. Maybe I'm not too old yet to get somewhere.