Posted by Declan on July 12, 2006, at 20:33:00
I should not be upset by the associations of self esteem....... the professions and business (esteemed colleagues) and commerce (building esteem, the profit and loss), the valedictory dinner. But I confess to preferring the language of religion, of grace, salvation, redemption, benediction, forgiveness, reverence, and blessings (blood and wounds), concepts that seem more suited to the consolation (if not mending) of broken hearts. Please do not divert me to the faith board; I have none (not even in materialism), nor hope, though love seems (suspiciously) easy.
(Since it is the greatest of the three, maybe there is hope for me yet? But I prefer TS Eliot's 'Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing', and just for fun, 'In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not'.)
TIA for allowing me to apologise for all this. Apologies and gratitude are the acceptable face of the abject.
We are so caught up in our psychic realities. This becomes apparent to us when our house burns down and we see the space it occupied and say 'Is this all there was?', or when we go through our parents' possessions after they are dead and see how small they are, and wonder (as with Ecclesiastes) if it had all been vanity.
With our psychic realities we need to be wholesomely firm and gentle with ourselves (wholesomeness not coming easily to me). To not take ourselves too seriously and find a way back to the playful.
Is self esteem a measure of the kinds of relations we have with ourselves? I like the idea that we should be to ourselves as a kind and wise mother mother is to her baby.
Declan
poster:Declan
thread:666502
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/esteem/20060706/msgs/666502.html