It's some years now since I started this blog, and while I did so mainly in an attempt at self-administered therapy, I've also always had a hope that my thoughts here would make themselves useful to others as well. This may be selflessness or it may be egotism -- most likely a combination of both.
Whatever it is, the desire has gotten stronger of late. As I ask myself why, the answer I come up with is that I yearn to know that my thoughts are important to others.
This is different than knowing that I am important to others. I have friends and family to whom, clearly, I am indispensable. But I also have this interior world, which is constantly churning and only occasionally given voice to those around me.
And this place within that I think of as my self wishes to be useful -- wishes to matter.
I have something inside me that finds less expression than it wants, that receives less recognition than it hungers for.
Is this impulse in some way the exact opposite of what it wants to be? It desires to help, yet that desire seems to be quite self-centered, does it not?
Recognition.
Importance.
Do we really give only so that we may in turn receive these things?
Or do we give because it feels good -- and because all too many things in this world do the reverse?
I don't have a ready answer.
If we do the best that we can, if we strive to be the best that we can, and if what we get in return does not make us sufficiently happy -- then how are we to retain any sense of worth?
And without that sense of worth, how do we go on?
Hope can sustain us, but what can sustain hope?
Perhaps a better question to ask, instead of these bleak and unanswerable ones, is, "Do others feel as I do?"
For if the answer is "yes" then the course becomes clear: find those others, and find a way to make them feel worthwhile.
Sooner or later, someone will do the same for you.
Thank you, goddess of love, for the ability to think things through.
Lovingly yours,
A devotee
