Self-Knowledge College

The Self Part 5: Selfish vs Selfless

archive.aweber.com

The Self, Part 2: Searching for yourself?

archive.aweber.com

The Self Part 1: Do You Find Yourself or Create it?

archive.aweber.com

I write principally on Self-knowledge (SK) with a chaser of fiction.

archive.aweber.com

THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF MY WIFE, PATTTI-ANNE'S, DEATH

archive.aweber.com

BACK FROM THE DARK! PLEASE OPEN!

archive.aweber.com

SELF SERIES №2. SELF-KNOWLEDGE: The Key to Your Best Life.
Read my article here: https://frankdaley.medium.com/self-series-2-self-knowledge-the-key-to-your-best-life-e4bcf1f542d7.

SELF SERIES №2. SELF-KNOWLEDGE: The Key to Your Best Life. This is a series on the Self, a series about you.

SELF SERIES №2. SELF-KNOWLEDGE: The Key to Your Best Life.

Frank Daley

Photos (when added!) from Unsplash

This is a series on the Self, a series about you.

This is №2

ASK YOURSELF (& then TELL ME!)

IF ANY OF THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOUR SITUATION.

BUT PLEASE READ THIS FIRST!


HERE’S MY PREMISE

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

If you don’t know yourself, three bad things will happen to you.

· You won’t be in the right line of work.

· You won’t be with the right person.

· You won’t be happy.

The third thing happens because of the first two.

Worse.

If you don’t love yourself, you won’t be able to love anyone else.

You can’t give away what you don’t have.

Even worse…

This will be your life until you die, unless and until you get to know and love yourself.

You know this intuitively. I’m just reminding you.


WORK

You won’t be in the right line of work: that is to say, a career, or a job, or a series of jobs, because you will not know yourself well enough to be able to choose the best jobs for yourself based on your gifts, talents, and abilities.

You won’t know what they are!


EDUCATION

But before you get to jobs or a career, you must get an education beyond high school.

In many places in North America, countless students do not even finish high school.

They are doomed in their working life to low-income jobs until they die.

If they can get any work at all.

AI is going to demolish many current McJobs.

Trump’s idea of bringing manufacturing back to the US is doomed on a giant level.

Who is going to push in screws when robots can do it faster, better, and cheaper?

But if and when you graduate from high school, what will you (or what did you) do then?

If you are lucky and smart, you will get some post-secondary education.

(I mean ‘smart’ because you know you need more education.)

I’m assuming you are inherently competent.

But what kind of education? College? University? Trade School? Other?

Even though many people use the words interchangeably, college and university are not interchangeable except in colloquial or lazy speech.

People say they are in “college,” but they could mean university.

You need more conversation with them before you understand where they are.

A college education can be two years at a liberal arts institution.

Or four years.

Or it could be at a community college, which could range from one semester to three years, or it could be a trade apprenticeship, military training, or some other training (theater, dance, culinary arts).

Having one of these is necessary to support oneself and one’s family.

PROGRAMS

But what program should you choose?

Up to 73 % of students in college or university change programs at least once.

Why?

Because they did not know themselves well enough to choose correctly the first time.

Or, often the second and third times, too.

Not knowing their gifts, talents, and abilities, they are distracted by well-meaning or traditional parental advice, peer pressure, media trends in jobs, and poorly trained high school guidance counsellors.

Then something happens: they have a baby, sustain an injury, become overwhelmed by drugs or a medical or emotional condition, or something else traumatic.

They no longer have the option of further education; they must cope with life.

But they haven’t figured out what they want out of life yet.

And, if by chance they do know, they can’t follow it up.

Or if they were poor academically (for many reasons which we’ll get into another time), they never had, or currently now have, the chance to discover and develop their talents.

Or they had parents who, through no fault of their own (because they themselves were not parented properly), had little idea what to do with their children.

Or they were not well-parented because their parents were more interested in their own lives than their children’s and did not recognize or nurture their children’s gifts, talents, and abilities.

You can’t teach what you don’t know.



TRADES, THE MILITARY, OTHERS?

There is nothing wrong with trades. Our society is biased against them, failing to see their worth.

But they provide enormous satisfaction for the workers and the beneficiaries of their work.

And for our whole society. They provide a stable, comfortable, relatively stress-free life.

They are also for artisans, craftspeople, chefs, animal lovers, and caregivers.

But most parents want their kids to be doctors.

We fail to understand that we are all here to serve others.

We serve according to our talents, capacities, and desires.

But if the child’s gifts have not been recognized and nurtured, whatever they may be, the child, an adolescent, and an adult are lost.

And s/he will stay lost unless retrieved magically by one person who intervenes and helps.

More unusually, the child herself determines that sterile life is not for her, somehow breaks through her own ignorance, and saves herself.

That is not common enough to count on.

WHAT ABOUT LOVE?

If you don’t love yourself, two bad things happen to you.

First, you can’t love anybody else

(You can’t give away what you don’t have.)

Second, you can’t accept love from anyone else.

You will think those who express love for you are crazy, stupid, misinformed, or want something.

Why?

Because you (think you) “know’ yourself and you “know” you are not lovable, not worthy of love.

Why do so many young people suffer from anxiety, depression, drugs, alcohol, and self-harm?

Even su***de.

You “know” people are untrustworthy, so you drop them before they can drop you?


Of course, all this is false and unconsciously done, but that makes no difference; it is what you believe and act on.

You will continue to believe this and act on this belief until you die or until and unless you come to know and love yourself.

Self-knowledge is necessary for your life to be all it can be.

This series will help you know yourself.

I assure you.

Frank



The Self
Self Help
Self Improvement
Self Knowledge
Personal Development


Sincerely,
Frank Daley

THE SELF: A SERIES ABOUT YOU (NO 1.)
Read more here: https://frankdaley.medium.com/the-self-a-series-about-you-no-1-2789e4324d87.

THE SELF: A SERIES ABOUT YOU (NO 1.) The most complicated thing in the world is a human.

Today, April 19th, is the second anniversary of my wife, Patti-Anne (Fitzpatrick-Daley)’s death from a sudden, massive brain aneurysm. She was 63 and in perfect health.

They can’t detect brain aneurysms unless with a Cat scan or MRI and what GP is going to just order one of those just because you have a headache?

We were together 35 years, married for 33.

We were happy from the beginning.

The age difference did not matter. She was 19 years younger than I.

She was not phased.

From an actuarial standpoint, it should have been I who died.

But if you think life is fair, you haven’t been paying attention.

She was a loving, beautiful, talented, funny, human being.

She had an astonishing impact on people, all in the same way.

I realized her life purpose after her death.

It was to show people, not tell them (she never did that), that loving people is not difficult.

In fact, it’s easy although not without being susceptible to pain.

Easy in the sense that anyone can do it; difficult in the sense that it opens you to rejection and pain.

Especially if you never know yourself and never stray from it.

Unlike most people who never really know themselves, she knew herself instinctively.

She never doubted it or wavered.

I wondered if she even thought about it related to herself. We discussed self-knowledge a lot, of course, because I help people how to do it professionally: to know themselves. I have written several books on it, but I had nothing to teach her on that subject.

She was sui generis, her own thing, nothing else like her.

I think that was one of the things that connected us so fast and so deeply: we each knew exactly who we were, and we liked, and then loved and accepted each other immediately.

At her funeral, everyone of all ages, from teenagers to seniors said exactly the same thing:

“I loved Patti-Anne.”

You met her and that was it.

She employed no defense mechanisms, no guardrail, no shield; she was just open to life and love.

We were unable to have children, but she helped her sister, Rosemary in Waterloo, with her three boys, her nephews; and helped Adriana and Gilles Roche, our restauranteur friends in Caledon, where we lived for 20 years, with their three children; and was a devoted and mischief-making aunt to her sister Mary Elaine’s three daughters, all of these from their beginnings as infants.

But she didn’t do this only for her family and friends.

When a young couple moved in across the street from us In Waterloo, she astonished the baby’s mother by bringing the infant a mobile to hang over her crib.

She had not met the woman.

She also loved and cherished my daughters, Rachel and Regan, for more than three decades.

Read the rest of my post below.

Second Anniversary of My Wife .Patti-Anne's Death This photo is damaged but it captures the essence of Patti-Anne: her smile, honesty, directness, openness, vivacity, frankness, and beauty. Today,…