Adversity, evil and metaphor

For a time I designed myth structures and commented on them, worked on heroquests, was published a little, have some credits. I worked on developing metaphors for evil and for adversity.

Saturday morning I came up with another one: tangled. In fiction and simulations things were "incomplete" with the emotions, patterns and motivations twisted. But too often, in real life, things are tangled.

Much of what we deal with, much of what afflicts us is tangled and misdirected. Not so much our evil self as our real self, only misguided, with cognitive shifts warped around the misdirection.

Loving ourselves is essential to unraveling these tangles that block and bind us. To allow self preservation to preserve us rather than harm us (as it does when it goes wrongly directed or focused) we have to accept it.

So, we acknowledge and accept what we currently are. Our strengths and our weaknesses, our inventory of what we are, how we have come together in a pattern of coping and survival that has flaws -- defects -- that make our lives unmanageable. Then, if we accept and love ourselves, we can look at how each defect interacts with our motives and lives, what it seeks.

At that point we can seek God's help to do what we can not do for ourselves, and untangle one more knotted area, unwinding, untangling and releasing. I had started thinking of tangled fishing line, but tangled muscle knots being massaged out also fits.

Stretching, trigger point release, massage -- all of these are efforts to restore a muscle that has knotted up by mistake to proper function. Releasing a muscle knot does not make you any less, it merely lets you do more with what you are, with less pain. But the muscle that is knotted up is not a part of you to reject or cut out of yourself, instead it is something that just needs release to function as a better part.

Anyway, that was my thought, my metaphor for the day.

so I just picked up the baby and told them to go back to bed, stating that he was only four days old and had not yet read the book

Recently read books:

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Paperback - Mar. 2008)

Buy new: $15.00 $10.20

And

The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies... Before It's Too Late

Also, just having been reminded of it in a thread I just read, an important book:

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (Hardcover - Sept. 3, 2009)