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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2316937-Through-the-Forest-Through-the-Trees
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by Gman Author IconMail Icon
Rated: E · Essay · Spiritual · #2316937
The following identifies how to let go of personal criticism to allow for personal growth.
From my own experiences I’ve found that wisdom of the human experience can be used as a weapon for anything.
Here’s the issue with hashing out your life: you can’t possibly do so honestly since there will always be parts that you’ve overlooked. Every time I try to rationalize my actions, I find that there is always something wrong, always something to fall into. And instinctively I allow myself to fall into my mistakes, because how else will I fix them? After I conquer each beastly version of each failure, I crawl out of each pit only to stumble weakly into another. I have no time to rest, nor time to reflect, as I’m constantly facing off with yesterday’s failure.
It’s tempting to believe that once you figure out how to be, you’ll have that perfect tempo down. As if morality is a particular skill that requires a particular technique of some particular rhythm to repeat. And yet I’m always asking myself “Did you even bother to think?” The answer to this is that I think intuitively to the point of unconsciousness, which worries me as much as it bores me. Why bother to think consciously if you’ve already drawn the same conclusions in some other part of your mind? Why bother to solve your plights when they never stop resurfacing, no matter how many times you solve them? Why bother slicing through the thick weeds when you’re sure to trip on the ones in front of you?
Then I started thinking about why this is the case. I realized that the pitfalls are the key to it all, not what’s inside of them. The failure of my actions isn’t typically caused by some unique flaw of mine, but rather a repeating flaw across unique instances. I see now that this flaw is the enantiomer of catastrophizing. It’s unnamed, so let’s stipulatively define this word as the conscious mind’s inclination to ignore powerful subconscious feelings of dread and anguish. For my particular case, we can sprinkle feelings of numbness on top to guarantee the impossibility of addressing those feelings.
So now I’ve got the reason as to why no amount of wisdom, knowledge, or patience will help when my flaw isn’t rooted in character (as much), but rather my inability to trust said character. For personal reasons, It’s fair for me to be skeptical of the morality of my actions, but even then, my judgments are more akin to paranoia. So what’s the solution to this ongoing state of false correction? Look where you're going. Quit running into trees, because even though you saw one a mile away, It’s here now, and it doesn’t care whether you saw it or not, because it doesn’t exist to serve you a message, nor does it exist for any special reason at all. It merely is, and so are you.
I tend to see the forest through the trees. I learn from how I think and determine how to think differently. But I’m fed up with chopping through trees, with slicing and hacking away. There is no perfect route to take because the trees are everywhere. A straight line is a simple path to walk in theory, but through the forest through the trees is exhausting and painful. It’s tempting to cut through each tree one by one so that I may see straight ahead as I envision, but there’s a forest that can be walked through with trees that can be walked around. I ought to sheath my wisdom, and let my conscious think out loud.

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