Absolute Extreme Self-Love

 

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.

It is reached when a man deliberately turns

his back on all help from anyone else in order

to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.

Thomas Merton

 

The surest way to unhappiness is to concentrate only on myself.

The surest remedy is to pray, not for my own comfort, but for God to bless someone else.

If self-centeredness is contributing to oury unhappiness, focusing some attention on others is the way out.

I always get help for the blues by offering a hand to another or accepting a hand myself.

I can avoid despair by looking beyond myself.

 

~~~ @@ ~~~

 

Dykes Of Courage

We must constantly build dykes of courage
to hold back the flood of fear.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Courage doesn't mean putting myself in stressful or unpleasant situations.
Courage doesn't mean controlling my emotions.
Courage is the ability to strengthen myself against the fear and despair of life, rather than be drowned by it.

I can be grateful for my courage and strengthen it.

Depression & Despair

Very few of us give ourselves the opportunities to explore our real interests and potentials.
We "lock" ourselves into rigid ways of regarding the world and our options.
We often settle for less than our highest aspirations because we have conditioned ourselves into thinking life is joyless endurance or survival at best.

In order to change the empty circumstances in my lives I need to change my limited thinking patterns.
Instead of looking at life as a prison, I can view it as a smorgasbord of opportunities that are well within my reach.
By exploring and sampling the choices before me I can discover which choices bring me inner satisfaction and increase my sense of purpose.

Today I will remind myself of what Roman philosopher Seneca said hundreds of years ago:
"The great blessings of mankind are within us, and within our reach . . ."