What do you use to quantify your self worth?

We have so many gauges we can buy into:


  • Likes on your Facebook page
  • How many friends or followers you have on Facebook
  • Likes on your latest Instagram post
  • Dollars in your bank account/savings account/IRA/401K
  • Credit score
  • The amount left on your student loans/house payments/car payments
  • The number on the scale
  • The number of social events you attend in a season
  • The of children you have
  • GPA
  • The number of colleges you've attended
  • The letters and/or numbers after your name
  • The zip code you live in
  • The number of rooms/bathrooms in your house
  • The number of clients you have
  • Your acquisition/retention numbers
  • The number of miles you run/swim/bike/paddle
  • How many yoga poses you can perform
  • The number of pounds you've lost/bench pressed


Photo credit: @kenindianamerican   (Instagram)
The list could go on endlessly but you get the point.  When we look for self-worth, we want to quantify that in a value, we tend to think when we reach that point it defines us.  We may even go so far as to say we have reached "enlightenment" or have moved into an understanding of light. In the journey it is so often asked of us to trust the move into lightness but if this is really a journey it's not only about the light it's about the dark-- about not only trusting our lightness but our heaviness.  It is not what we have that quantifies our worth but at finding at what that is. We have to look at our darker side to find what really matters and where the light is. This poem written by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke expressed it in these words.

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing--
each stone, blossom, child--
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to learn that before he can fly.


So if you want to fly, explore what makes you heavy and then--  FLY!


Comments

  1. Ton blog est vraiment "très" étonnant mais il vaut d'être suivi.
    Je te souhaite beaucoup de lecteurs.
    Bien amicalement.

    Roger

    ReplyDelete

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