When We Have Our Stakes in Things Out of Our Control
What is it you cherish most in your life right now? This could be a wide range of things and odds are there is many that come to mind. Still, one remains supreme. The one that you hold onto most dearly; if it were destroyed you’d be in ruin, and so when it is threatened you fight with all you got in order to preserve it. This is the thing I’d like us to look at today. What will make you most nasty?
Inside check
Where do you place your ‘self ‘and all you comforts into?
What would you do to defend this security of yours?
What happens when it is threatened? Destroyed?
Has this item changed across your lifetime? What caused this transition?
Inside Out Goal
Finding a sense of our self that is impervious to attack
A Safety Blanket
When we begin our journey within to answer these questions, perhaps we realize our source of security has changed across time. This could help to give us some perspective; to look back at how trivial the object seems to us now yet how nasty we got when we were fighting to preserve it. Has there ever been anything in your life that you thought held all the rest of life together? I know in my immaturity in youth I held onto several of these items. As a toddler (and even later on in my childhood I regret to admit) there was a special blanket, given to me by my mom, that held a very special part of my heart. As a mama’s boy, in a way it represented our special bond together, and I would not let anyone take that away from me. It was quite literally my “safety blanket”. For my under-developed brain, it was a way for me to take an un-seeable thing (the bond between mother and child) and put it onto a physical object I alone had the power to protect and treasure. Nothing could come between me and my blanket (I naïvely thought), and any force that tried was going to have to get through me first.
Growing up with four siblings, this, as you can imagine, provided an easy target for my brothers and sisters. In sibling battles they would always turn to the blanket in order to settle things right then and there, they knew my desperation facing losing it would always leave me to be complying with whatever we were disagreeing about. What I thought was my strength, proved actually to be my downfall. My well-being and the care of a physical object had been tied together; sadly, I let myself become completely dependent on something that with time was going to wear out before I could even learn to make a bed properly with it.
A Quilt of Many Fabrics
I see now how silly this obsession was. And yet, despite how silly it may seem to me today, it is still a problem I face regularly. Though the object has continually changed the concept remains, I put my well-being into the empty stores of a self-made creation. My sense of style, my personality, the things I have in my possession, my career, my popularity, my reputation, and encapsulating all–my ego: in these I lay my livelihood, without them I would be destroyed.
Shifting our Defenses to the Impenetrable
When we place our very sense of peace and security into a thing we force ourselves into the unending toil of defending this thing. Let my siblings’ cunningness using my blanket to their advantage be a lesson, when we store our sense of self and identity into a thing that can be easily attacked and taken away from us, it will absolutely be used to our detriment and by those most out to get us.
What then shall we place our identity in? While that is a freedom each human being has the right to choose only for themselves, I’d advise you store it somewhere internal. Not internal in the sense of ego, but internally in the peace within you. A peace that comes upholding to your moral and character obligations or in your love and service for others around you. What is a source of identity that only you have the power to change? No one can either bolster it, or attack it. These are the areas in which you got to take your stand. Then, any battle at preserving it becomes a battle you do actually have the power to win. The battle is with yourself and yourself alone. Only you can allow yourself to act contrary to the way you want.
Holding a Safe Identity
So, consider what is it that your store your identity into? Is it something that only you have access to? Or is there harm it may be hacked into by sources you don’t want getting access? What are past storage containers you have used to no success? Learn from these past lessons and use them in determining where you want to hold your keep now. Then, make sure that this source, even if completely impenetrable by human forces, does not become an obsession for you. If you are not willing to cut away anything, even intrinsically, then you are always in danger of having a crisis. Only Truth itself fully preserves. In it lies the perfect source of storage, accessible since before you were. Find yours and enjoy its peace, true peace that nothing can subtract from.