The H’end of the Road

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, Opportunity, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is actually an interlude from my previous and forthcoming blogs on “the end of” series. There is a similarity to the “end of” to this blog, but it is a different twist.I’m going to have a little fun before I get to the meat of this blog, the essence of which I think is quite important for many people, perhaps all people at some time in their lives. But I want to indulge myself in one of the things that I live best: language. I am by far not nearly the skilled linguist that many people are although it would be a fond wish to be able to speak Russian, French, Swedish, Spanish or German fluently after having studied each of these languages enough to say, “hello” or “where’s the bathroom?” I also studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in school and still am able to parse out a word that might have such origins. You might wonder what the “h’end” of the road might mean, so let me tell you. Deb and I lived in Newfoundland, Canada for four years, a most glorious experience and our only long-term cross-cultural experience, not of the depth of someone living in Zambia, grant you, but Newfoundland was a good place for us to be and we yet treasure this very unique province and retain good friends there. Due to its Irish heritage, much of which shows in its music and subculture, there was a tendency of many Newfoundlanders to add and subtract the letter “H” to words seemingly at random, but of course for Newfoundlanders it was not random. For instance, the letter “H” was often added to words that began with a vowel and just as often deleted from words that began with an H. We heard a person speaking about her “h’anger”, not “anger.” Likewise, I heard a woman talk about her child who was very “’yper,” not “hyper.” I came quite certain that there is rhyme and reason to the shifting of the letter H, but I never got the hang of it. However, I remember one very distinct instance when we were visiting an “outport” Newfoundland town and asked a lady where a particular bed and breakfast might be located. Without missing a beat, she said, “Sure, I know where it is. It is at the ‘h’end of the road just past the h’apple stand. I ‘ope that I was ‘elpful.” A young person in our car repeated her exact words with the emphasis on “the h’end of the road.”

Enough of my linguistic jostling. Now I want to talk about the real issue: when people come to the “end of the road,” whimsically called “the h’end of the road.”

The End of the Road

My thoughts about the end of the road (or the h’end of the road) began just a couple days ago in a conversation with a patient who said that he seemingly had come to “the end of the road.” We talked about this vision that he had, and then examined this phenomenon, namely with the contexts of the future, the present and the past. I have since shared this picture with several other people in my office who I thought might profit from this picture, which we might call a metaphor or even a vision of what lies ahead for them in life. Over the recent three days I have found myself using this end of the road picture quite relevant to several of the people (all men, of course) I have seen. Importantly, almost all of these people have all been in their 60’s including:

  • A man, 67, whose wife left him for another man and now that that man has left the “new man,” he wants to come back home
  • A man, 63, whose wife has also left him, but not for another man, but rather because she admits that she never should have married him, and has been relationally unhappy for 30-odd years
  • A man, 65, who is single and never married, who is looking at the rest of his life, which includes who he might be with, what he might do for a profession, and where he might live
  • A man, 62, who has had a good and sustainable relationship for several years with a woman who has been a very good friend and conversationalist, but now it seems that their differences might suggest that the relationship might not be sustainable any longer. He is also looking heartily about his profession and the place where he might live.
  • A man, closer to 50, who has just lost his very successful job, has lived unhappily for many years in a marriage, and all things seem up in the air for him.
  • A man, 58, who has been typically and frequently angry all his life and is only now looking at his deeper feelings and how to communicate them
  • A man, not even close to 50’s or 60’s, who is looking at a life that includes possible drastic changes in his vocation, his family relationships, religious orientation, and even a more significant element of his very nature
  • A man in his late 50’s with a good marriage, good professional life, good house, and generally a good life who has fallen into a significant depression because, despite the fact that he has been a good person all his life, he hasn’t attended to his feelings.

All of these men seem to be facing what I come to a place in their lives where things in the future seem to be quite uncertain and vague, but more importantly, an opportunity for a good life, if perhaps quite different from what their lives have been over the past decades. The surface questions include:

  • Should I be married or otherwise with this person in my life?
  • Should I continue in my current profession, find another one, or should I not be working at all in any kind of formal job?
  • What kind of financial security do I need for this new life that I might have?
  • What might I lose if I move into this new life?
  • Is there any urgency for me to make a decision?
  • What are the external factors that I might face in this new life?

These are the objective and practical questions that they are asking, but I believe that there are also subtly asking subjective questions, like:

  • Can I hang on to the security what I have had up to this point, like the security of house, family, marriage, profession, or gender identity?
  • What dangers are there in this “new life” and am I prepared to face these dangers?
  • What abilities and experiences can I take along with me that might be useful?
  • What relationships, property, feelings, and beliefs do I need to leave behind?
  • Can I have the best of both worlds, meaning the past and the future?

Wanting it both ways

The answer to the last question, “Can I have the best of the past and the future?” the answer is “yes.” Yes, you can have the best of the past, but you can’t have the experiences of the past, the relationships as they were in the past, the property of the past, the money of the past, and the job/profession of the past. You can have the best of the past but not the things of the past. What is the best of the past? It is what you have loved, what you have lost, and what you have learned. You can’t have the kind of relationship you had before. You can’t have the property you had in the past. You can’t have the ideas you had in the past. You can’t have the family you had in the past. In other words, you can’t have it the way it was…but you can take the best of the past into the future. The best of the past is what you loved, how you loved, and the memories you have of such things. You might stay in a marriage, a relationship, a job, a profession, a house, or a city, but your new life will not be the same. You will have a new perspective of life and life around you built on what you have done, said, felt, and thought. This is the best of the past, but it is not the past carried into the future. You don’t forget about the past, nor do you allow yourself to simply live in nostalgia of the past. Rather, you will be looking at the present and the future with the knowledge, skills, experiences, successes, failures, and mistakes that you made in the past.

The people whom I made reference to above said to me something like:

  • I don’t want to lose what I have with my wife, so I am afraid of challenging the situation that I find myself. This is scary.
  • I can’t see clearly where I should live so I will just stay here because it is safe. Anywhere else is scary.
  • I love my partner for sure but maybe if I wait for a bit longer, she will change or I will change so we don’t argue all the time. Anything else is scary.
  • I don’t think I can make it without the money I was making in my previous job. I’m scared of living in some kind of poverty
  • I want to keep on telling my wife that I love her hoping that this “will get through to her.” I’m afraid that if I don’t, she will never come home.

Note the operative word? Scared. They are scared of doing anything, saying anything, or even daring to feel anything because they don’t want to lose what they have had. I think in all of these cases that they have already lost what they want, most likely will never get it back, and they are putting their heads in the sand hoping for some miracle. They are all at the “h’end” of the road, the road of their lives up to this point. And they can’t have it both ways: they can’t have what they have had and what they might have if they really move forward. But how to they do this? how do they “move forward” into their new lives?

Moving into the new life

I think of all of these people, people of any age, who have come to the end of the road in some way (or a combination of ways), need to face the fact that the new life needs to be substantially different spiritually than in their previous lives. I could also use the term “emotionally” because emotion is a significant part of moving into anything new, but this new life certainly has an important emotional ingredient: No fear. I also call this the “second half of life,” however old the person is, because this “second half of life” is substantially different from the first “half.”

  1. You can’t enter a new life with any kind of fear, none whatsoever. Sound impossible? It is. I state this “no fear” element because fear cannot be the dominant factor in their lives. Recall the fears noted in all of these people:
    1. Fear of losing wife
    2. Fear of being discovered
    3. Fear on not enough money
    4. Fear of what people think of me
    5. Fear of failure
    6. Fear of criticism

All of this has to go, or at the very least, be at a minimum level

  1. You can’t take “the best” of the past. This is the love you have, the successes you have had, the mistakes you made, the things that happened to you. In a nutshell, you take into the future what you have learned in the past.
  2. You will most certainly have some of what you had in the first part of your life, like relationship, property, friends, and the like. But you will not be hanging on to these things, which has kept you impotent in life.
  3. You will love more, love better, lose better, and love again. It may be the same person, place, or property, but it will not be loving with a closed hand because you now know that you will most certainly lose everything that you love at some time, which means people, place, property, and ideas.
  4. You will make a difference in the world. That will be a place where you are no longer interested in acquisition or approval, but rather the opportunity to be of service.
  5. But first you will have to “collect” the past so you can use the best of the past.

Collecting the past

  1. I am not a particular fan of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) while I acknowledge that AA has helped countless millions of people. I do like what they call the 4th step: making a moral inventory of oneself. I would not so much limit this important “step” to morality but to life in general, specifically, at successes and failures
    1. Examine your life and see all the love you have had, all the successes you have had, all the losses you have had, all the good people in your life, and most importantly, how you have been of value to the world
    2. Examine your life and see the regrets you have had. The things you should have done but didn’t; the things you should have done but did; the things you said that you shouldn’t have said but did; the things you didn’t say that you should have said but didn’t.
    3. Draw from these good, and not-so-good experiences what you have learned
    4. Keep these things in your mind, not so much to remember what was said or done, but what you learned from all of it
  2. Store these things in your heart. You may tell someone, or you may not, but have no fear of telling or not telling. It is not approval or disapproval that is important, but rather having the knowledge and wisdom you have had.
  3. Now you are ready to look forward but be careful to avoid falling into “wanting it both ways,” like dragging all the money, property, and people into the future. Whatever you retain for the future will be in a new light because now you can love knowing that whatever you love, you will lose.

Now, are you ready to use the end of the road as a good starting place?

The “End of Things” I: Theory

Ron Johnson Children, Development, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, social esteem

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of blogs on what I am calling “the end of” certain things. In all of these blogs we will examine the various things, sometimes behavior, sometimes feelings, sometimes experiences, that plague humanity psychologically including:

  • Anger
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Addictions (behavioral and chemical)
  • Confusion
  • Physical distress
  • Relational distress
  • Loneliness
  • Vocational dissatisfaction
  • Lack of sufficient money
  • And others (?)

I use the expression “end of” carefully because to have an end of something suggests that there is something wrong. I am primarily interested in suggesting ways that these various maladies that occur with us might come to an end. I will be making a case that these challenges, whether they fit nicely into a formal psychiatric diagnosis or not, are caused largely psychologically and can be successfully dealt with psychologically. My overall perspective of all these various challenges is that they have similar derivations and hence similar ways that they can come to an end. The following is my overall perspective about these various challenges in life:

  • There is a lack of development in all of these situations. This means that some portion of one’s nature did not develop sufficiently.
  • Most of the time this lack of development was due to inadequate parenting in some way.
  • As a result of inadequate parenting and the subsequent lack of development, certain things in life did not work as they were designed to work
  • The brain got involved and created a means of facing life without adequate tools to engage the world
  • The brain found alternate ways and means of engaging in life as a way of compensating for the lack of development in some area.
  • The brain continued to direct the person into alternate means of engaging life despite the fact that these alternatives had deleterious effects
  • In most cases the person tried to correct or change these alternatives without success in that endeavor
  • The alternatives in life began to dominate the person’s life and ultimately became life-damaging, if not life-threatening
  • It appeared that there was no cure for the ailment, i.e. no way for it to end, which became a dominate factor in the person’s life. It also appeared to be unchangeable because the person had lived with the alternative to adequate development all one’s life: anger and/or all the other phenomena that happen to people in this situation

The developmental understanding of distressing and disturbing things

The purpose of these several blogs is to identify the causes of the difficulties we have in life…because we all have them. These difficulties do not come from some kind of vague biological origin, some cultural pattern, or the so-called “choices” we made early in life that set a pattern for some kind of unhappiness. This having been said, know that I am going against the current orientation in psychology, certainly borrowed from psychiatry, which states that the problems we have in life are of primarily biological origins and secondarily from cultural origins. Simply stated (and there is much more that I could say about this), there are both biological and cultural origins for the difficulties we have in life, whether the poverty that many underprivileged people have suffered to the inherited tendencies that we all have toward some kind of functioning the world, and ultimately to both the physical anomalies and the psychological anomalies that we all have. I will not discuss this matter further, mostly because it is out of the arena of what I want to say, but also because it is a very complex matter, namely the interaction of things biological, cultural, and personal.

As we look at the developmental origins of what ails us, we need to look carefully at what is normal, or perhaps ideal, development. Consider the following in the development of children:

  • The first year of life is one where the child needs three things: safety, comfort, and nurturance, probably in that order.
    • The predominant emotion that an infant feels is fear or the absence of fear. The infant does not feel joy, sadness, or anger. The crying that an infant does is generally without tears, as crying is because of fear, something like, “If you don’t take care of me, I will die.”
  • The second year of life is a time of exploration where a child needs a wide berth in her life in order to explore, both the exploration of words and walking and the exploration of the physical world.
    • The predominant emotion that a toddler feels is joy. She feels joy because she experiences the rudiments of love: love things, love parents, love exploration. This is also a time where an infant begins to have a rudimentary feeling of “self” and rather enjoys being herself. She talks of the blanket or puppy being “mine” and frequently says “no” as another way of establish herself as a separate being.
  • The next three or four years of life are times of experimenting with life as well as wanting, having, and losing. Now the child can walk, talk, run, grab, and perhaps break. During these crucial years of early childhood, the child has ideally had the safety of the first year inside of him, and the experience of having something. Now the child experiences wanting, and he wants much more than he wanted during the first two years of life, which were predominantly safety and experience.
    • The predominant emotion that a pre-school child has is anger. He gets angry because he doesn’t get most of what he wants not knowing that his wants have multiplied by 100 because he can walk, talk, and grab things. He wants more, so he gets less of what he wants. Of course, he doesn’t know that he wants more; he just knows that he doesn’t get much of what he wants.
  • The next six years of life (and to some degree for the rest of life) are times of experimentation in the world. This means achievement in something, like academics, music, art, athletics, or dance. It also means relationship development, which requires a whole bunch of things that were not necessary during the first six years of life. This is also a time for understanding the acquisition, use, and care of physical property whereas previously parental figures took care of such things, whether changing diapers or providing toys to play with.
    • The predominant emotion during these years of life (sometimes called “latency”) is sadness. The child is frequently sad because he/she doesn’t know how to manage the ways of the world, whether in activity, relationships, or property. A child in this time of life loves a lot, whether people, places, or things, and loses a lot. A child who gets through this stage of life learns that all things end, anything that is love is ultimately lost.

When a child does not get to through these stages effectively

It must be obvious that no one gets through theses stages of early childhood unscathed, which means that no child is perfectly loved, cared for, encouraged, challenged, limited, and nurtured. Parents do their best…they always do their best…despite the fact that some parenting is awful. Again, I will not elaborate on this matter as it is out of the purview of the current discussion. More important that the awful parenting that some children get is the good parenting that most people get that is yet inadequate. My primary interest is to look at good parenting that is not good enough and the consequences of such deficiencies:

  • Infancy: when a child fails to get the safety, comfort, and nurturance that he needs, this child will retain fear as the predominant emotion in his life.
    • Then all the rest of life is based on fear, which includes the other emotions of joy, sadness, and anger. But beyond the emotions, the child who has not overcome the fear of dying will see death at every doorstep, namely with every person, every opportunity, and every experience.
    • The result is some form of anxiety
  • Toddlerhood: when a child is deprived or indulged in the arenas of exploration and opportunity, this child will retain do one of two things: she will continue to want everything, or she will fail to want anything.
    • If she is not given enough of the rudiments of wanting, having, and losing, all the rest of life will where she feels there is no way she can have what she wants.
    • If she is given too much of what she wants, she will continue in life expecting that she should be the center of attention as she was when she was a toddler.
  • Pre-school: frankly, this is where most disturbances come with most children, and ultimately with most adults. This should be a time, as we noted, where I want a lot, don’t get much of what I want, and get angry at that fact. There are two dangers:
    • Not getting enough and not being allowed to be angry (and sad) about not getting what the child wants
    • Getting too much of what she wants and failing to realize that in life you want too much, and that fact is simply difficult to accept
  • Latency: As noted, with these years that should be devoted to exploration and experimentation that naturally lead to a lot of disappointment, hurt, and sadness. If the child doesn’t get enough experience and experimentation, he will forever want it and not be satisfied. More importantly, he will not have the important ingredient of feeling sad because he wants something but doesn’t get it, and the accompanying experience that he can want something else and have it. The potential problems during this state of life include:
    • Not having enough freedom to experience and experiment, which then results in the child not having sufficient experience of wanting, having, and losing
    • Having too much freedom, largely without restraint, where the child does not come to value the essential nature of limitations.

As we explore some of the challenges of life as noted above, like anger and addiction, it will be my task to suggest the causes of such maladies, identifying particularly the lack of clarity that people have in their feelings and emotions, and finally suggest courses of action that might be taken to remedy these difficulties and allow them to end.  Be it know, however, that allowing such things to come to an end is extremely hard work, something that most people do not want to do. The best example is of a person who says he “wants to lose weight.” I would content that he does not want to lose weight. Rather, he wants to have lost weight because losing weight is extremely hard to do and no one likes the work it takes to do it.

See you soon.

Good for Me; Bad for Me VII: Good for Me; Bad for You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, family, Feelings, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

My wife likes masks. I don’t. So what does this have to do with “good for me; bad for me”? Lots. Let me explain, but first let me review what I’ve been writing about in recent blogs.

I have proposed that there is a spectrum of things that are, quite simply, “good for me” or “bad for me.” Furthermore, the spectrum ranges from mildly good for to very good for me on one side and then mildly bad for me to significantly bad for me. The spectrum in its simplest form is:

Something that is good for me                               /                             Something that is bad for me

I further suggested that the “bad for me” and the “good for me” sides of the spectrum could be subcategorized as follows:

  • The bad for me spectrum ranges from mild to profound:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive                /                      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                                      to                                                     (profound)

  • The good for me spectrum also ranges from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting            /           Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                        to                                                                    (profound)

We most recently discussed “complexities” of such things, like when you don’t like something that is good for you, like green vegetables that my grandson hates, or working out that I hate. The present discussion is also complex but the complexities are different because they include times when something is:

  • Good for you but not good for someone else
  • Good for someone else but not good for you
  • Good for you and someone else
  • Bad for you and someone else

I want to help you find ways to deal with all these possibilities because this is the heart of the what makes a good relationship, where a brief encounter at the grocery store or  a long-term marital relationship. Furthermore, there are challenges that occur in relationships when there is agreement as well as when there is disparity in what is “good for you” and “bad for you.” In the following categories I am collapsing “liking” and “good for you” for purposes of brevity.

Good for me; Bad for you

This is the most common challenge in relationships, again noting that “relationships” can be intimate or brief. In this category we have at least the following:

  • I like Trump; you don’t; and vise versa
  • I enjoy green vegetables; you don’t
  • Alcohol is good for me; not for you
  • I need to talk; you need silence
  • I watch TV; you don’t
  • I like to read; you don’t
  • It’s good for me to wear a mask; it’s not good for you
  • I trust doctors; you don’t
  • I am a theist; you are an atheist
  • I like debates; you don’t
  • I favor the Black Lives Matter movement; you think it’s awful

Let’s consider one or two of these. The current health, political, and cultural matters so dominate America, whether it is Black Lives, wearing masks, or Trump. How difficult is it for you to go into a store where you “have to wear a mask”, or is it difficult for you to go into a store and see other people without masks? This is an example of the highly emotional element that is always involved in something that is “good for you” or “bad for you.” When emotion runs high, there is a danger of a certain kind of emotionally-caused blindness, superiority, or anger. Consider how you react to the mandate for masks or the lack of people following the mandate for masks, and you will find emotion. Now consider that this emotion erupts from your inner self or soul. Deb and I have just finished our final review of I Want to Tell You How I Feel in which we discuss how “feelings” erupt from a central core self and go sequentially through physical, emotional, cognitive, and active expressions. While we all have all four of these expressions, some people tend to recognize and express themselves in one of these expressions predominantly. Furthermore, emotion is the least developed feeling expression in America and hence the most dominant. So instead of simply noting that you feel sad because you are mandated to wear a mask, you get afraid and angry. Likewise, you do the same jump from sadness to anger and fear if you see other people failing to wear masks. I would propose that it would be helpful for all to recognize that masks are “good for you” and “bad for others” as a start. But this asks a lot of people: it asks them to be sad rather than angry. In my mind this is emotional maturity, i.e. staying with the disappointment, hurt, or sadness rather than letting allowing anger and fear to take over. This is the heart of what Deb and I wrote about in Good Grief.

Back to my original statement: Deb likes masks; I don’t. Well, it’s not true that I “don’t like masks.” What is true is that I choose to wear a mask in my office, which I deem as private, only when requested to do so by a patient. Deb, on the other hand, wears a mask with every patient and requires her patients to wear masks unless it is particularly inconvenient for them to do so. We have found some commonality in the mask-wearing matter but only as we have identified the “core self” matter, which I will discuss forthwith.

We could take any of the other examples noted above and examine them from the perspective of how some things make me sad, a sadness that I might tend to race right by preferring to be self-righteously angry or unduly afraid. There is more to the story but allow me to delay this discussion for a moment and examine the case when something is…

Good for you; Bad for me

We could consider all the political and cultural themes noted above. Let’s look at the Black Lives Matter discussion. This is a very good example of how many people feel deeply passionate about this movement, whereas as other people feel terribly offended. Supporters of Black Lives suggest that Blacks have been disenfranchised in America and feel deeply that there should be some political and cultural change to rectify this inequality. People who are not in favor of this movement speak of “what lives matter also” speaking of Caucasians, or “blue lives matter” speaking of police. On both sides of this discussion, however, lies a tremendous amount of passion with an even stronger element of anger. We have good people who are passionately demonstrating for equality sometimes becoming so engrossed in their emotions that they throw rocks into windows out of anger. We have equally good people who value “land order” and see window-breaking as “wrong”, so they fight back at people who are seeing that America’s cultural state is “not good for them” while their opponents see the movement as “not good for them.”

Let’s consider a somewhat more benign situation that is not so hotly emotional, like it being “good for you” to believe in God compared to people who find such belief “bad for them.” How can this happen? How can people feel that believing in God is bad for them? Being a theist myself, I have to stretch on this one, but I conjecture that atheists find so much wrong with religion that to even speak of a god is to speak a kind of evil. And it is important to note that both theists and atheists talk about “facts” and “science” and “logic” in defending their positions, which are more accurately feeling-based. So what is “feeling-based” mean? How do things become good for me or bad for me out of my “feelings”?

Feeling-based convictions

Since I have just finished the final review of the feeling book that Deb and I have written, this matter is very much on my mind, and it gives me a perspective of this “good for me” and “bad for me” matter. Feelings, as I see them, are an eruption out of our core selves, but I must quickly note that “feelings” and “core selves” are terms that are not defined, nor more so, by the way than time, distance, and mass are defined in physics, life is not defined in biology, or love is not defined in the human condition. To say something is “feeling-based” is tantamount to say that this something erupts from my core self, which in my mind is perfect, or perhaps the better word is pure. Hence, I would contend that the core self of someone who loves Trump is speaking of this purity/perfection just as the Trump hater is speaking of this purity-perfection. Then these two people express their core selves in a way we call “feeling.” So far, so good, as we then have two people speaking from the purity of core self expressing their core selves in feelings. But this is where things go array because people tend to race right through the physical manifestation of feelings and the emotional element of feelings right into the cognitive expression not knowing that they have missed the point. The point is that they have a core self value that is pure but this core value is not easily communicated in words and action without first recognizing the emotional element along the way. If we could agree that the core self always is love-based, we would know that any expression of feeling is love-based. Then we might be able to talk about what we love rather than what we hate; we could talk about what is important to us rather what is anathema; we could talk about what is good for us rather than what is bad for us. This is a tough task and not many people do it.

Good for you; Good for me

This is rather simple category what simply suggests that something, whether Trump or masks, we can find some commonality with something being good for both you and me. Hence, we have political parties, athletic teams, musical themes, and academic pursuits that are good for you as they are good for me. There are actually a lot of them, and it behooves us to remember how many of these things there are.

By the way, something that seem good for me and good for you might not, actually be so good. It might not be ultimately good for Black Lives protesters to feel good about throwing rocks, and it might not be good for the folks on the other side to throw rocks at the demonstrators.

Obviously, the same goes for something that seems bad for you and bad for me. It takes an emotionally mature person to realize that when something seems bad for me, it might also be ultimately good for me. All of this suggests that it important to note the “good for me” and “bad for me” first, then the same for other people before trying to find the common ground, the common ground always being the purity of core self. Oh, that we could communicate our core selves to one another.

The challenge

The challenge is to actually see that our surface “good for me” or “bad for me” erupts from our core selves, which are as close to God (or godliness for you atheists) that we can get. Starting with this we can see that love is at the basis of all good and all that seem bad. Would that our cultural, religious, and political leaders could have this kind of conversation.

In the meantime it will be necessary to simply note, “this is good for me” or “this is bad for me” before we enter into any kind of discussion.