In terms of personal cleansing, my situation continues to be remarkable for me in that, from a hermit’s enjoyment of stillness and silence, I find myself being nudged out of my cave still further.

The number of important (to me) decisions I need to make continues to increase. The world is pressing in.

Last night, overnight, I downloaded a new software operating system for my laptop. It locked me out of my computer, which contained my password sheet. Oh, you have a back-up, you say? And on what do I unload the back-up if I can’t get into my computer?

Once I got back in an hour or two later, thanks to computer company support, at every step the new program required that I set a new password. This is a new requirement.

I think I now see why. Every time I went to set a new password it asked me to give that program the right to confirm, edit, and delete (email, contacts, etc.). I said no way.

Delete my email? My contacts? Where are those requests coming from?

So I got through all this stressful and complicated work and saw that another assignment which I can’t discuss is awaiting me that has to be handled diplomatically and has the potential to create another ruckus.

I know, deep down, that Michael is raising every last piece of old business to the surface, but I feel ready to drop from the pace and weight of it. I surrender!

It’s inviting me to drop feeling responsible for everyone else’s burden – while still feeling compassion.  It’s piling the stress on (cognitive dissonance) until I drop all my considerations and accept the new paradigm – to just flow with the situation and the moment.

***

I consider it untenable to think that I can hang on to these mechanical ways of being and run a group of companies.

Dominant among the old ways of being was resist, resent, revenge (Werner Erhard’s term).  That only brought me sorrow. I’ve lived long enough to be able to look back and see that. It would not be possible to run a group of companies from that position. (1)

If I try to solve the increasing number of problems that are arising from an intellectual place, sooner or later I’ll succumb to the unworkability of it. Right/wrong, right/wrong creates unfinished business at every step. Time to go another way (repent).

I have to rely on my intuition (my guidance, my heart), with confidence in myself or fall by the wayside from any number of circumstances.

I increasingly feel the need to behave like a balanced adult. It isn’t so much that I’m putting myself in a box, although I am.  (2) It’s more that I’m leaving behind the extreme emotions I used to control people with and accepting that I’m 100% responsible for everything I say, do, and feel. The Humpty Dumpty Man, having come together, is growing up.

I hear Michael saying, does it sound like love? I really am going to have to come from that context no matter what. The alternatives are getting fewer and fewer and the cost higher and higher. And time may be running out.

Footnotes

(1) I’d succumb to the Hitler effect. I watched a biography of Hitler some time ago by French historian Guillaume Pretty and his comment has always stayed with me.  He said:

“I’d say that Hitler was a man trying to gamble and that, at the start, the fact that he neglects the whole dimension of strategic tactics, the type of ground logistical problems. All of these oversights don’t catch up with Hitler the war lord.

“And then, one day, all of these conditions for war, which should allow a war leader to grow, catch up with him, and from then on, all his bets systematically fail.” (Guillaume Pretty, “1942: The Year The Germans Lost The War | Hitler’s Lost Battles,” Timeline, at [youtube.com/watch?v=BuBIpe0f91w], in “Finding Blame is like Making War on a Person,” May 29, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/05/29/finding-blame-is-making-war-on-a-person/.)

I’d be gambling on people being deferent to my position. But the first time the gamble didn’t pay off, the wall of image management would begin to crumble.

(2) I think of this as reparenting myself.