Some of my best
guesses:
1. No one is as important to you as you are. You
are your Number 1. If you work your fingers to the bone, your fingers will be
bony. If you sacrifice your life for someone else, you lose your life. If you
love someone to death, they die; you have the love, although I would guess it
wasn’t really love. Actually, I guess that nothing is as important as your body
is; it is the only spacesuit you are issued on this trip to planet earth. When
you break your spacesuit, it can sometimes be repaired, sometimes not. I guess
there are people who are so in pain in their spacesuit, they want to take it
off and the pain can be physical or mental (which I suppose to be about as
physical as physical pain, if not more so. (Ever had a broken heart?)). Consider
the permanence of deactivating your spacesuit. You can’t cheat death. And you
may not really want to. You may just want to take a vacation from your life.
Since you are taking care of Number 1, you can figure out how to take some kind
of break that won’t break your spacesuit. There are lots of ways we think we
are taking a break that is slowly breaking out spacesuit, such as fueling it
with too rich of fuel, too often. “Do not tope off” would be a good motto to
fuel ourselves by. Maybe go sit and stare at the sky, examine a leaf, an anthill,
or take a nap.
2. I presume that putting you as Number 1 could
be seen as selfish. But it isn’t. Putting yourself first means you come before
money. You come before debauchery. It also means you get to practice
discrimination about priorities in your life. If you put yourself first, you
can put what is important to you right after that like 1.a or 1.1. And you will
still be in your body to do that. It is awful hard to clothe and shelter the
poor or feed the hungry if you aren’t in the physical plane. And as far as I
know, you most likely cannot be transfixed on the beauty of a bank of pink
clouds in the grey sky at sunset if you don’t have your eyeballs talking to
your brain, and why, if you don’t know that that takes a body in its live
state, you can stop reading right now.
3. I try to remember what a great meditation
master asked once, “Is it pleasurable or is it beneficial?” I have a bad memory
or maybe it is a lazy one, so I forget to ask myself this as often as would be
beneficial.
This
takes me to my next guess. Lazy isn’t just a way of being. It is a big bucket
of boggy misdiscription. For instance, there was a notion made by guessers that
people in the South were just plain lazy (I have always been fancy lazy) but
guess what? They were not lazy. They were anemic. This article explains it very
well and uses some interesting and silly words: http://beck.library.emory.edu/southernchanges/article.php?id=sc04-6_002
So
the next time you think you are lazy, I think you ought to, at the least,
figure out what your “hook-worm” is. What has you hooked in your inertia?
Because you are putting you first, you should have plenty of time and energy to
figure out what makes you tick tock. Maybe what you are doing when you are
being “lazy” is your favorite thing in the world to do. And that is okay as
long as it doesn’t fill you with guilt and shame. If it fills you with guilt
and shame, it probably is not beneficial, but only pleasurable in the shallowest
sense of the word. Do not underestimate the power of habit. Maybe the road you
take is always the same, the scenery the same, and you aren’t being able to
look at life, and its bounty of views, instead you are dead bored. Sometimes an
adventure of any kind can break your cycle of inertia.
When
you get home from work, do you go change your clothes so you can go play and do
chores? Do you make it easy to adventure by establishing beneficial habits?
Do
you throw your stuff down in a pile and immediately do the same activity that
keeps you in one position such as being one with the couch. That is fine, as long as you know what you
are doing vs. not doing, AND you are still taking care of Number 1.
4. I guess nothing feels any worse than having
nothing to eat, no place to stay and being pestered by mosquitoes, fleas and
flies while being too hot with nothing to drink. You might want to avoid that
situation if you possibly can. Some people (especially children) can’t. If you
relatively easily have the power to take care of Number 1 and not find yourself
in such a state, you are one lucky human. I know I have been bold enough to
presume that you Number 1, but it doesn’t hurt to know that you are actually so
important you could make a difference in the world especially if you are one of
the lucky ones. You can keep up to date on just how lucky you are by visiting: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810
5. Something that can feel like you want to be
worm food is if you feel like no one in the world loves you. Here is the secret
to that; you don’t experience love unless you know love and how to love. I
theorize that love is like the old question “if a tree falls in the forest, and
no auditory receptacles are there to hear it, does it make a noise?” I know it
is slightly reworded. But here is the question that I suppose you could ask
yourself when you feel like nobody loves you and maybe even God hates you too:
“Can a person feel love, if they don’t love anything, if they have no idea what
love feels like?” It can seem awfully altruistic, but doing something for
someone that makes you feel love vs. makes you feel loved is a lot more doable
than striving to make people love you. And honestly, it is usually a surefire
way to make people love you anyway.
6. Honestly, nothing beats honesty. I don’t
pretend not to lie. In fact, the people who I have found to be the biggest
liars are the ones who say “I never tell a lie, you can count on me to always
tell the truth.” Uh huh, you betcha! Those are the people I look at and think –
you poor lying idiot, get away from me!” I guess there is nothing as powerful
as a person who lies, knows when they are lying and why they are lying, and
then gets on with the truths of their lives. And we hope they are not evil. Being
evil is never looking out for Number 1. People who are motivated to do evil are
obsessed with a state of being that is hell as far as I can surmise. Have you
ever known a good, happy person do something that society would deem Evil?
I
like to envision a special hell for people who lie with the motive of
persuading people to believe silliness; silliness that will hand their power
over to the Evil liar(s). I guess you can always count on plenty of lies in
wars, slavery, massacres, holocausts, and sometimes in organized religions
even. Perish the thought.
Sitting
on the fence and using omission to avoid telling a lie is a damn sissy way of going
about taking care of Number 1 in my book of guesses about living a good life.
If you don’t want to talk to someone or go do something with someone, say so, don’t
make the other person wonder what’s up because you are so wimpy you can’t say
what is on your mind, honestly! Or at least tell a lie, honestly, and relieve
the other party of wandering in the land of wondering. Fib up a storm with
something like “Sorry Charlie, my horoscope says I shouldn’t step foot out of
my house and as a Taurus, I am loyal to a fault to my horoscope, which also
says not to talk to anyone whose name begins with a “C”, good bye and good
luck.” Putting a person off is demeaning, and will hopefully come back to haunt
you or so I like to pretend. You may think you will crush the other person if
you make a declaration and then you may be lying to yourself. You may just be
afraid to have another person know what you really want. I guess you could
think you have to be surreptitious about your motives. I am excited to break it
to you; you always have motives, and in order to take care of Number 1, I
speculate knowing your motives and what you want is essential. Honestly.
