Today I want to talk to you about the antecedent and precursor and condition for mental health, for well-being, and for the process of healing from life's inevitable slings and arrows.
You see, we are all born handicapped. We are born around our explorations of this scintillating cosmos, we are born around the enclosures of identity and distinction, also known as self and personality.
Life is therefore a process of ever greater constriction as we ossify into ourselves, from becoming to being, inexorably fossilized, trapped in the ambers of our lives, peering out of the ashen hourglasses of our dwindling sands, not comprehending, befuddled, bemused, and very often terrified.
We are ephemeral creatures made of dreams. We are made of stories and narratives that allow us to soar beyond the confines of our egos, and yet we rarely forgive ourselves, for being who we are, for having cravenly eschewed and forsaken the alternatives, for having matured, grown cliches and subdued banalities.
We then often embark on self-unitive and gory crusades against our most miserable existence.
We meet out harsh justice against ourselves. We have the judge and the jury and the executioner in one.
And yet all this is wrong. So wrong.
If only you could behold the child inside you, that vanishing promise, bright-eyed and filled with wonder, if only you could open yourself to the experience of being human, this fleeting, heart-rending apparition. If only you could make reality itself your dream. If only you had reached out to the drowning and the mentally emaciated and the emotionally overwhelmed and the fearful in the night, build bridges.
And yet it is the terror and pity of it all. This sublime slime that we all are. This sinking feeling of semi eternal twilight and the ethereal promise of a breaking dawn.
If only you could love yourself in all your frailties and folds and forlorn hopes and frustrated endeavors and the losses that make up your biography.
If only you could forgive yourself for being you.
You are imperfect. You are limited. You are transient. Your knowledge and information are always partial, always biased.
Despite all these impediments, you are really trying, hard, persistently. You're doing the best you can.
The decisions and choices you make and that you've made are the only ones you could have made.
And you are here. This is proof of your perseverance and resilience and inner strength.
There is a nucleus inside you that knows to tell the difference between your essence, which aspires upwards, and your actions which drag you down.
The spark, who you veritably are, this spark is your essence, and it is this spark that you should forgive and then embrace.
Having attained self-love, you could not.