If you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are poverty.
That particular formulation is credited to Jesus in a Coptic text called the Gospel of Thomas, but the sentiment has been expressed by everyone from the Delphic Oracle to George Lucas. In order to understand the world one inhabits, and to operate in it effectively, one must first understand oneself.
It’s a thought that’s been on my mind lately, partly because I turn 30 today, and even arbitrary milestones make me stop and think. It’s not like some kind of magical “adulthood” lever gets flipped – I already have a wife, two kids, a mortgage, a graduate degree, and a steady job, so I think that boat not only has already sailed, but is well over the horizon by now. But it’s a significant (to me anyway) passage of time nonetheless, so it makes me think about how I approach the world, how I frame my own priorities, how I interact with others.
The last one is something I’m not giving myself real high marks on as of late. I’ve been surly to people who’ve been kind to me, and hard on people I should have been easy on. There are several examples that come to mind, most of them from places in my life I tend not to discuss on-site, but one that’s bothered me a lot was a…I was going to say “fight,” but a better word might be “episode” – that I had in chat a few evenings ago. A political topic came up, and I thought it might not be a good idea to discuss it because it might cause conflict. It’s fine as far as it goes to have opinions about what are good topics of conversation, but I took it way past that and got very snarky and overbearing, and ended up being pretty nasty to Gossamer, creating exactly the kind of situation that – ostensibly – I wanted to avoid. (I’ve apologized to her in private already, but private apologies for public offenses can perhaps most kindly be described as disingenuous. So I apologize again here, as sincerely as I know how.)
At any rate, perhaps the lesson for me is that setting oneself up as the ultimate arbiter of decency is best reserved for Emily Post. All it does for me is make me arrogant and get me in trouble. Not a lesson I’d wish to learn from experience, maybe, but a good one to learn nonetheless.
I’ve got a lot to learn about a lot of things, including myself. But if I can make even a little bit of progress, I’ll take that.
|
