Some of my best guesses

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.