The good choice.

What is the greatest thing to be achieved in this life?

Often times, putting the needs of others over your own can be difficult. I cannot say it is the easiest thing to do to sit on your hands and do nothing so that others may live in comfort - because by acting on your own desires, you may impede theirs...either for their own hopes, or their own comforts. And that is often what I must do.

How can I call myself a friend if I don't act like a friend should? My friendship doesn't end as soon as I want more. No, I can only choose to be a good friend, and nothing more. Everything else will follow, and it will either be what I want or it will be something better:

"...We do not always have to foresee every possibility. We have only to judge whether the act is right, just, and accords with the truth and love here and now, because we "believe in the good" and are therefore convinced that, whatever consequences may follow, they will certainly be good ones, beneficial to ourselves and to society." - Thomas Merton

...And so as Merton says, I go on, doing whatever good I believe I can in my friendships. Even if it means not being as close of a friend as I would like. Even if it kinda hurts to say nothing where I would really like to.

This is why I dislike when menboys go after girls who have only recently broken off a relationship. They need time, and they're so selfish they won't give them any. I believe they call it "catching her on the rebound" and it's little more than emotional manipulation. It's disgusting.

What is the greatest thing to be achieved in this life? It is to be a virtuous person, I think. Truly virtuous...and to have that quality is worth everything. I would go as far as to say that it is better to die a good man than to live as a cheater, liar, thief, or murderer. It's to never give in to the easy path, even over the smallest thing...it's to say "never!" when evil comes and calls.

I'll never join you!

That's what that choice is. Selfish, and therefore evil. Even if it seems trivial to some people, you can never be a virtuous person if you make exceptions for even the smallest evils.

So, never. I say never.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream to do good always.

The pay-off.

In human action and interaction, there is rarely, if ever, any sort of arbitrariness. There is always a "point" to it...something I am trying to "get" or "achieve."

It is a dangerous business to always go through life without examining what kind of pay-off I am trying to get from my actions. "What is the point of what I'm doing?" I must ask if I truly wish to be a person of virtue.

I have become aware, recently, of how lax I have been in checking myself for these pay-offs. I thank God that I know I'm being an arrogant fool sometimes. It comes out in a few of these posts. While it may be true I feel like a Jedi when I counsel people, I think it is true I tell people so not for any reason other than because I want their approval, which is a very silly reason. If I am to be someone who only cares how God judges me, that's not really the way to go about it.

Even while I am being more vigilant in my awareness of why I am doing what I'm doing I know that I must have blind spots. This is why I have decided I need to make sure I am getting plenty of virtuous friendships. The path to righteousness was never intended, I believe, to be taken alone. This is why I am very grateful for the friendship of a man I will refer to as G.

G and I only met this year, and I must say at first I was a bit annoyed at him. Not because I didn't appreciate his sense of humor and found him a bore, but because I was so unused to not having to work to make friends with someone that I found it almost irritating. But I am grateful I decided to throw this aside and give it a shot. G is a great Catholic man, and even though he seems awkward and timid to the unobservant, in reality he is definitely not afraid to ask me the tough questions. "Do you think you're reading too much into it?" He asked the other day as I told him a guy-to-guy story. I thought briefly and answered "yes" because of course I was.

I appreciated this probably more than I let on to G, because I need friends like him to alert me to my blind spots. Someone to sharpen my iron, to use the Pauline phrase. I know I can count on G to help me grow in virtue, because I can tell that even more than he likes to have fun with me, I know he wants to grow closer to Christ, and help me in that, too.

G is, of course, not the only virtuous friendship I have. I could mention a few others, some of whom are probably my readers (I believe there are about 8 people who regularly keep up with this blog in any regular fashion, and I have perhaps indulgently assumed these are my closest associates). However, G is a great example of what I hope to have more of. I find I am increasingly less interested in idle amusement in my friendships, and more and more interested in learning something from them. This is what attracts me most to a person: their wisdom that I so desperately need!

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for a virtuous pay-off.

Catharsis marathon.

I'm really tired, but I need to write this before I forget again.

Catharsis...The process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. I've been having a lot of that. Closure type stuff. Over and over and over. My life is bipolar.

Really there is a downfall to knowing lots of people. Your life becomes a little unpredictable especially where love is involved. Mostly I have learned that reciprocated feelings are rarer than unreciprocated, and there is a lot of that going on around here.

A recent rash of honesty with people lately has gotten me into trouble more than once, but at least on one occasion recently it did me a lot of good. Case in point: Something I've been touching on a bit here and there in my last few posts...what I was doing that I knew might in the end really hurt me. And I was right. I finally confessed my full intentions in a certain friendship. And in the end, it was met with an honest rejection. It was good. I handled it really well, I believe, and I'm a wiser person.

I also know that years ago, I never could have handled that situation as I did...and be able to say confidently as I type this that I am doing really well. Just trying to do the right thing and letting go of my desires in this situation helped a lot. That trust has taken a long time to build...the act of surrendering my future to the Lord, as it belongs to Him alone anyway. I know that this doesn't own me.

Catharsis.

Still, I'm tired now and I'm ready for life to be a little more boring for a while...A little less emotional, a little less tense. But that's for God to decide.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for eternal catharsis.

Funny in a sense.

My life is hilarious, if you have the kind of sense of humor where sad irony and odd situations are funny.

I suppose I must be going crazy, because I keep losing control of myself. Just in the past few weeks, I did a couple things I really regretted. Nothing permanent, but what I did was either a little mean or insensitive, or just entailed too much information.

I think it may be in part due to loneliness. It seems like most folks are really too busy to hang around with me, which is sad. When I'm really interested in people, they tend to fall off the face of the earth. That's not to say that every once in a while I get to spend good time with people who never fall off the face of the earth, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.

Loneliness sends me into psychosis. Nothing else will drive me more crazy than not being able to talk to people. But it seems like a lot of the time when I talk to people, they don't really seem interested in what I have to say...or for some reason, I clam up and don't talk. Sometimes I feel as though I shouldn't...that listening is more valuable for me than talking and I just better accept it. It may have something to do with being told I share too much a few weeks ago by someone whose opinions I value greatly. At the time it hurt...but later, I wondered.

I'm very tired of women. I admire women greatly, but it seems as though I just have too many lady friends right now. Women are confusing sometimes - Men are blunt and simple, but women are into nuance and ambiguity, it seems. I admit that I can be ambiguous too...often, even...but that doesn't mean I like it.

Yet like a double-edged sword, I don't really have lots of guys to be friends with, and I can't have the same kind of friendship with a guy as I enjoy with the ladies around here. It's hard to describe, but while I have more in common with most guys, I relate better with women. Hmm.

Still, if I were to share everything going on in my life on this blog, it would be too much information and too much conjecture. I am a counselor - I notice things concerning people others miss. Sometimes I don't like it.

Sometimes, I just want to be ignorant of it all.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for a sense of sensibility.