Musings
From The Heart
An
Essay A Day For A Year
By
Roe
Day
140 May 19, 2012
The
Confusion Of Priorities
“What do
I do? What do I do? When do I do it and in what order do I do it
and what if I don’t do it and what don’t I do and . . .uh. . . but . . . Argh!
Help! In our modern lives we are
not just often torn and confused about what our priorities are and what to do
when, we are always torn and confused about our priorities and what to do when.
If we do only what we want to do when and how, we are labeled selfish, and we
suffer. If we only do what is required of us for by others when and how, we
suffer worse. It seems as though our
lives are a complicated mixture of the confusion of our priorities that cause
us to suffer. What do we do?
Our first
priority is and should always remain being faithful to our own selfish and
self-serving and self-centered ways.
When we pass through a healthy and necessary series of stages of me, me,
me, and my way or no way, we eventually mature and end up with spare self for
others. We are all given a cup to fill up when we are born, and if we are
allowed to grow up our way in our own time, for our own reasons, then we fill
up our cups in our own time, and for our own reasons. Duh.
When we grow up our own way, in our own time, the way we choose, for
ourselves, we live out all the stages of me, me, me, and we end up owning our
cups, and ourselves. When we own ourselves our own way, we end up with a whole
dollar of self, and we end up willing and able to share some spare change with
others.
When we
grow up struggling to get our cups full, when we struggle for recognition and
struggle for attention, and struggle for Love, then we spend our whole lives
struggling for recognition and struggling for attention, and struggling for
Love. Double duh. How in the world can we get our priorities
straight when we aren’t straight ourselves?
How in the world can we get our priorities straight when our cups are
not full, and we spend all out time trying in the present to fill our cups that
are only half empty or half full from our past?
How in the world can we get our priorities straight when that takes
spare change, and we are so limited in our dollars of self that we have no
spare change for ourselves or others.
In order to get our
priorities straight we must first know who we are. When we know who we are we know what we want,
and when we know what we want, we can compare and contrast and value and judge
and prioritize ourselves and our lives. To know who we are we must have a full
cup of self, a full cup of Love. To know
who we are we must have a full dollar, and with our full dollar we clearly know
what matters to us most, and what matters to us in the middle, and what matters
to us least.
At the base, primordial core
we are our triune brain. We are first reptilian, lower brain, and autonomous
natural creatures, then we are emotional middle brain, limbic creatures, and
finally we are cortical, mental, thinking higher-brain creatures. As whole selves we must be a harmony of our
biological, feeling, and thinking selves.
Our first priority is to oxygenate our blood, then we must pump our
blood, then we must drink and eat, then we must digest and evacuate waste. We are biological, living creatures, and our
first priority is to survive. Luckily
for us, our reptilian brain handles all of our autonomous functions to leave us
free to be aware that we exist. Just
imagine if we thought minute by minute: “Gee, I’m just not sure what to
do! Do I pump blood or have a candy bar
or shit or breathe. Darn! I’m so
hesitant and confused!”
Next in our priority is to
“feel’, and we do this in our middle brain, our limbic, feeling brain. We are not aware of the fact that feelings
come before thoughts, not just evolutionarily and historically, but in sequence
in the here and now. Our thoughts are
reactions to our emotions, our thoughts are manipulations and controls and
responses to our feelings. The vast
majority of our actual true feelings are unconscious, based on repressed primal
experience that is in fact mortally threatening to us, or was when we were
children. It is impossible to be able to
prioritize our lives and actions properly or accurately when the vast majority
of us is hidden from our very selves.
Our desires and needs and abilities to live and function and respond and
act are largely controlled by our unconscious histories, which ironically we
are unaware of due to defensive repression. In order to not be confused about
our priorities we must be aware of our whole selves, and we must be fully
conscious of all needs and motives and limitations and issues of self.
Once we are fully conscious,
once we know who we are, we will automatically know what we want, and
powerfully enough to not be confused about our priorities. Our priorities must be arranged within our
self in order of value based on our needs and based on the outcomes that best
fit into our realities. The prioritization of our responses to our life depends
on the value of the outcome of each individual gain or loss. We may rate our need to visit our aging
parents as a 9 out of 10, and we feel compelled to do so. We may also rate our
need to spend a joyous night of making love with our date as a 99 out of 10,
meaning no comparison whatsoever, and so we make love and neglect our
parents. We may rate the guilt and shame
that we will feel tomorrow for not visiting our parents, based on past
experience, as a 999 out of 10 on the painful side, and off to visit our
parents we go. We may rate the loss of
our disappointed lover forever as a 9,999 out of 10, and again we decide to
visit our parent some other day. In
order to choose where we are on the scale we must know and decide where we are
on the selfish scale, where we are on the self-less scale, we must know clearly
how we rate the issue in question, and how badly we want or do not want the
outcome or sacrifice or joy.
Prioritizing is about
compromise, and compromise is about dividing up the cake of life. Do I want to drive my Ferrari fast enough to
get a thrill and risk dying, or do I want to make it to my daughter’s
recital? They say that you cannot eat
your cake (it’s gone because you just ate it), and have it too (you can’t,
because you just ate it). But that is
what we all want, and our confusion about priorities is simply the difficulty
in placing value on one thing or another, or one thing or all things, and then
having to decide which, and having to compromise. When we are whole and
connected selves, fully known to ourselves, we can much more easily know what
cake we want, when to eat it and how much to eat, and how much to save for
another time and why. Being clear about priorities is being clear about valuing
our own selves vis a vis the demands placed upon us by our lives and by others.
Being clear about our priorities is a by- product of being clear, and clearly
living. Being clear about our priorities
is about honoring the most important two letter words in the language of self,
the word ME, and the word NO. And when
we can own ME and NO, we can own the time when we clearly and honestly, with
heart and mind, can say YOU, and YES, and clearly know the place and time for
one and the other, us being the one, and you being the other.
My first priority is to
breathe and pump blood and to nourish and evacuate myself, and when I have the
time and energy, my next priority is to fully know and love my whole self so
that I may truly know how much you and what you want of me means to me. The
rest takes care of itself. But it all
starts and ends with ME and NO, as it does with you. We may then come together as US and YES,
which is also known as LOVE. There is no confusion of priorities in true and
clear Love.
See you tomorrow.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
How sweet it is when our needs and wants end up being the same.
ReplyDeleteHow sweet it is when our needs and wants end up being the same.
ReplyDelete