There is a difference between living in pain avoidance and pleasure seeking vs living honestly. The first two can lead to a dichotomous and hollow life in conflict based on pleasing others that offer pleasure or threaten pain. Living honestly is to live in ownership of our own actions and acceptance of the consequences, enjoying subsequent pleasures and growing through resultant pains. The latter of these can look much like the former at first blush. The key difference is the origin of our motivation. Living in pain avoidance and pleasure seeking is to allow external stimulai that promise pleasure or threaten pain to drive our actions. Subsequent outcomes in this case are actually passing relief from pain interpreted as pleasure and blame rather than growth stemming from our difficulties. To live honestly is to be be motivated from within ourselves through a deep knowledge of our own needs and desires in the face of what others define as proper behavior or goals, with acceptance of the outcomes as being our own creation. In this way we can feel a lasting fulfillment from positive outcomes we own, or growth in deeper understanding of our own strengths and limitations with further insight to the validity of our goals.

My life is coming together exactly as it needs. My life is part of an incomphensively large system where all of its elements are connected not by strings, but in their entirety and in perpetuity. It is only by living my life fully, in complete ownership of my actions and outcomes, that I can fully realize my role in this magnificent system and enjoy all it has to offer.

I often write of my right to senses of freedom, belonging, confidence and living my life as I feel to be best for me. I do not however have a right to anything I am unwilling to reach out and claim.

It is not a sin to possess wealth, not even immense wealth - unless we fail to grow with our wealth. Wealth facilitating gratitude and generosity provides for riches beyond what money can buy. Unappreciated wealth fosters greed and arrogance, bringing about a lonely isolation no amount of money can abate.

Some people go through their years growing and becoming wiser, more interesting people through the experiences they are continuously making for their selves. Others just grow old.


This is a day of gratitude for having you in my life to enrich it with the vast set of experiences and vitality you bring. 


May neither of us ever grow old.

A person must grow at their own pace just as the wick of a candle burns in it's own time. "Forced growth" creates instability. Just as slow growth creates a strong, interesting and beautiful wood, so also does naturally paced growth create a well rounded human.
Growth is essential for vitality otherwise one simply composts in place. The stagnant feed on their own ideas born of long gone by circumstances. Failure to grow, to adapt, leaves a person with voids in their life, emptiness that is often placated from the outside world rather than addressed. When an event arises beyond one's adaptibility they instead cope, leaving the circumstance ensconced in pain like a knot in a tree where it has experienced trauma, preventing its essence from flowing freely.