Excuses

I would like to stipulate as a general moral principle to which I can think of no exception that you never help anyone by making excuses for them.  All of us have within us compasses which tell us how to begin to move in the direction of wholeness, wellness, health, and thriving.  But we ignore this compass because the way is hard.  It doesn’t look hard, it IS hard.  This doesn’t matter.  Growth is why we are here.

I myself have had an enormous amount of painful growth I have endured, and continue to endure.  I get pain better than most.  But I dream of a day when no matter what somebody comes to me with, I can say I FEEL THAT.  I have been there.  And there is another side.  You can get through it.  I did.

I can’t imagine any rape or incest survivor, any soldier with PTSD, any refugee, has suffered more than me.  As an infant I feared daily that my mother was going to kill me, and I never really bonded with any adult growing up.  I never felt a sense of love and safety.  I entered life with severe PTSD, depression, pervasive anxiety, hopelessness, and a piss poor social support network.

And I think this is fucking great, because it makes me USEFUL.  I crawled on my hands and knees a thousand miles, and I got to the other side.

Returning to the thought, I would stipulate as a general principle that if you are not thriving, if you are not living as close to the life of your dreams as is possible for you, and if you are not working daily towards it, you have made excuses.

I have a tattoo on my left arm based on one of the Sets of Three John Wooden was raised with, modified slightly: “Don’t Whine, Don’t Complain, Don’t Make Excuses”, to which I added “Never Quit”.

This is indelible ink–or at least I choose to treat it as such.  It is a burden at times.  These are hard principles to live by, and I haven’t even come close.  But it is an absolute code, and a good one, and I think most of the problems in the world would be solved in short order if everyone lived by this code, and simply added curiosity.  That is the entirety of my moral system in a nutshell.

I write too much.  I actually need to be somewhere.  But it comforts me, and it helps me build the visions I need in order to learn how to hope.  And it is not unreasonable for me to suppose they do others good.  My struggles are not so very different from yours.  All of us, if we are lucky, have some serious shit to get through and learn from.

Edit: you know, it is pointless to compare miseries, and it occurs to me I perhaps being grandiose comparing myself to others.  Suffice it to say my difficulties have led to more understanding, but that every situation and every person offer the opportunity for MORE understanding.  Comparing joys to joys or miseries to miseries is like comparing the breeze on a mild Tuesday to the breeze on a mild Wednesday.  Why?