May 3

INTEGRITY MONTH: DAY 3: “It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many of us know someone who is having a hard time adjusting to living for just themselves? This happens to adults with children when the children leave the home. They may have devoted their time, attention and resources to raising the children and feel lost without that focus. Or when a couple who has been together long-term finds that they have been focused on acquiring things in the material world and wakeup with one another, virtual strangers. When we focus outward, whatever the reason, we are going to be lost to US. While most of us can identify as selfish and self-centered, there is a balance that must be reached for self-actualization. In some ways of thinking, this is the goal of life. Once we have achieved our needs for vital necessity, such as food, shelter and safety, we have a ladder of needs that are striving to be met for us to become whole as human beings. Most folks are quite busy with the meeting of those needs to great excess. When they step out of that role for whatever reason; illness, the death of someone significant to them, retirement, divorce, etc.; there is a shock (like a slap to the face) that they are quite unhappy and dissatisfied with these things. The reason for this is that they have never stopped to question the busy-ness of just getting stuff and acquiring bigger, better and more of it. No life is satisfied with this. The more we get, the more we want. As addicts, this should be quite apparent, but seldom is. We have constant input from advertisers and social media to increase what we have to feel better and happier, but it NEVER works. Oh! And then we find that our lives have been structured to support things we never knew we were creating. This is so sad and it is, unfortunately, the way our culture has flourished for many, many years. Never are we allowed to be happy in this dynamic, because our spirits and souls cry out for something that cannot be bought, earned, or created by someone else for us. This is a sense of spiritual purpose and meaning for what we are doing and have done. The children will leave and their need for us is going to wane if we have done our jobs in raising self-supporting and self-efficacious men and women. They will leave a hole in the time that was used in the care and nurturing of their lives and spirits. Our partner or mate will become a stranger if we are not engaged with them in a mutually-supportive and soulful exchange of ideas and life experiences. Our culture is full of lonely people, living in big houses, surrounded by activity, but feeling empty and void. We are not given the tools for spiritual mastery of life. We may have religious training, but it seldom fulfills our need for self-care that is so necessary for us to flourish. How do we become self-actualized? It is a lifelong journey to the center of our own hearts, something few folks ever get the chance to even begin. There is so much activity, and very little simple action. And integrity demands that we stop and pay attention to who we are and how we are doing the things that resonate within our hearts. Most of us have lost all sense of the dreams we have carried since we arrived here. Addiction is a symptom of a lost soul, not the only symptom, but a good one. Recovery will demand that we stop and pay attention, or we will feed the addiction in another way. It happens every day…all over the world…and it breaks the hearts of all of us.