Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
Worshipping Your Self???
Then you will destroy yourself.
Everyone wants to feel important in some way, and that is fine. But how we go about it is another story. Through the ‘lens of self’ we may come to see other people as only annoyances, and life as so routine that we actually become unaware of the beauty in it. Some days, it’s hard to see otherwise–we’re busy, after all, with jobs, children, and all those everyday things we have to do. We can get so busy, with so many goals, that we’re not really aware of anything except ourselves and what we have to do. We can become extremely short with others, and easily put them down. A beautiful day goes unnoticed, the person struggling beside us is overlooked; we don’t even see them. Why? Because it’s not about them it’s all about us and what we have to do.
But we can decide otherwise. We can decide how to see our world through another lens. We can decide not to put ourselves in the highest place–because there is something here on earth that is higher than we are, something with beauty and order that we ought to esteem. And we can remind ourselves to look.
If we look through a deeper lens, we will see the presence of a much higher power than ourselves. You and I may know that power as God. Maybe others don’t believe in God. But listen to these words from David Foster Wallace, in a commencement speech at Kenyon College, 2005.
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. . . .Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. . . . The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: This is water, this is water.”
—The late David Foster Wallace wrote articles, essays and novels, including 1996’s Infinite Jest, a sprawling comic tale of modern America.
Translating a World on the Edge 