Monday, February 15, 2010

Self-Belief in Harmful Overdrive

DRIVING PAST a suburban home along a busy highway I noticed advertisements festooned all over its brick fence at front. “Remote Control Repairs,” they said. It seemed a little out of place to me. Then I thought, ‘Who gets their remote controls repaired these days (in a disposable world such as ours)?’

It illustrates a problem for a vast number of us that have bright and bold visions of where we’d like to get to, only for a multitude of reasons we won’t make it.

Sometimes we dream up a version of success and it looks good to us. We develop a ‘business model’ and go in search of the dream life. Yet, at times we fall so in love with this prospect of our success that we delude ourselves beyond receiving feedback to the contrary. We filter out the negative constructive feedback and only listen to the soft unimpressive trickle of positive flattering feedback (from those wanting to make us feel good).

“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many [trusted] advisers they succeed.”

~Proverbs 15:22 (NIV).

Hell-bent visions can, for this reason, be dangerous; for the ego certainly, but also from the perspective of the time and money we invest in the pipedream that can never come to fruition because there’s no need of it, or we don’t have the credibility for it—to our dreamed-up extent—in this world. Wasted time is not recoverable.

The safer and more effective way surely is about always being grounded and sensitive to our real prospects. Surely we’d be happier if we knew we’d only have the modicum of success—for not everyone can be rich and famous, enjoying great renown—compared to that we’d ordinarily desire, for the little successes can then be enjoyed for what they are. We never get to the clamouring and frustrating stage of asking, ‘When will this thing take off?’

Success and happiness around successes are funny things. They’re alluring and enchanting. We find our particular flavours of success are linked very much to our inner person; the part of our person desiring the fantasy life. But fantasies will never deliver successful, realised outcomes in a world of reality. They never can and never will; not the way we see them anyway.

Being grounded in reality is surely the best outcome of all—though it is at times painful. Reality seems harsh and uncomfortable, and the vast multitude seem bent on escaping from it in their drunken stupors, but things are not always what they seem.

Reality has a scary veneer over it. But once the primary emotion of the truthful event experienced has taken bite, all is terrifically okay—we become at one with the truth, for it is only the truth that can inevitably set us free. This is a biblical principle (see John 8:32) which is true to life—everywhere, all the time.

We’re loath to become so in amid of our own self-image of delusion. It’s a very discouraging place to find ourselves in, especially when visions of the truth set in.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.

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