A Sunday evening before a Monday workday and I am contemplating what has been a very productive and pleasant weekend spent in the company of people I love, and thinking about the immense damage we do to ourselves over time, and how it becomes damage we do to others. Of course, a lot of the damage we do to ourselves has its origins in the damage done to us in life, and there’s that whole ‘choice piece’ to contend with, because once the damage is done, the choices are still our own, and then there’s the ‘accountability piece’ too, because whether we willfully choose an action or not, the ownership of the things we choose to do falls to us regardless of our choice, in all but what is forced upon us. It’s complicated to think about, sometimes, and recently I think about the logic of choice a lot. Choice works best when you know as many of the available options as possible, and for years I just didn’t understand how wide open the vista of choice really is. That has limited me more than I understood.

I’ve been searching all my life for ‘happily ever after’ – a fairy tale ending, more or less, I guess. Not reality; reality hasn’t always been good to me. Something hit me this week, sometime in the midst of tears, pain, emotion, and turmoil, both internal and external… maybe ‘happily ever after’ misses the point as goals go? Would I be more productive, more satisfied, and even happier if I turned my attention away from the goal of ‘happy’ and focused more on ‘meaning’? A mindful, meaningful, life… it’s a different idea for me. I’ve tended a bit more toward easy gratification of obvious desires, or needs that don’t infringe on other priorities (or do so in a way I can overlook).  I don’t have a lot more to say about that from the vantage point I have this evening, as I watch the sun sink low, and listen to the contented sounds of life at home; I just have hope.  Hope feels pretty good, and for the moment, good choices don’t seem out of reach.

I’ll admit that one thing that has been big for me lately has been ‘tearing down my idols’ – finding the bits and pieces of nasty leftovers in my basic learning of things that simply are not true, don’t actually reflect my values, or are remnants of assumptions, premises, and teachings that have been long over-turned but not corrected in my thinking and decision-making. It’s a slow process and sometimes quite sad; the discovery that some long held notion is a ghost in my machine, or worse still some malicious booby trap left over from some earlier time, place, and relationship…well, saying ‘it hurts sometimes’ doesn’t even begin to describe the quantity of tears or magnitude of disappointment.  It is worth it to make the slow steps to being who I most want to be.