...even though I feel that it's a personal weakness to be dependant on others' positive regard, seeing as they might be mistaken, or I might be mistaken. I've lived most of my life as a loner, and sometimes I think the skills of social awareness are practically blind in me, so far as navigating and feeling my way. I think I have a phobia of grandiosity, at the same time as I cannot escape giving a certain impression of it. I also have recently been struck with the idea that I might have been Alexander the Great in a former life, something which seems both extremely logical for my character and extremely...well, as I said, grandiose--in any typical social analysis...
It's a paradox of grace, I suppose, that if you announce spontaneously to others that you possess it you almost certainly don't, and that the times when you are most in the practical flow of following duty or need, nothing exceptional or needing (or wanting) praise/recognition, are the truest moments of its manifestation--uncalculated, instinctive and humble. One does not speak of it--one does not want to. Sometimes it's impossible to feel it at all inside, even though there is evidence of deed, even though one can rationally see how it adds up to be something 'praiseworthy', there's something that separates it from all one's other physical and/or mental skills, prevents it from seeming any asset on its own. To truly be "a good person", perhaps one must be forever in deepest doubt as to the validity of that conclusion. And yet at the same time, not to care--that is, not to be watching the scoreboard in one's mind, to tally up the good deeds done, the needful words said at the crucial time, the positive PR in the outer world. Not to be watching one's moral investments for their anticipated return, but to act as if all these deeds and words both matter absolutely and matter not at all.
Which means, in short, that it's hard to know what what to do with any good repute, not that it's worthless but that it's worth so much to have done something to deserve it. And still one feels a bit stupid to have so little to say directly in return but "thank you"...
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It helps a lot....
Date: 2005-08-17 01:21 am (UTC)It's a paradox of grace, I suppose, that if you announce spontaneously to others that you possess it you almost certainly don't, and that the times when you are most in the practical flow of following duty or need, nothing exceptional or needing (or wanting) praise/recognition, are the truest moments of its manifestation--uncalculated, instinctive and humble. One does not speak of it--one does not want to. Sometimes it's impossible to feel it at all inside, even though there is evidence of deed, even though one can rationally see how it adds up to be something 'praiseworthy', there's something that separates it from all one's other physical and/or mental skills, prevents it from seeming any asset on its own. To truly be "a good person", perhaps one must be forever in deepest doubt as to the validity of that conclusion. And yet at the same time, not to care--that is, not to be watching the scoreboard in one's mind, to tally up the good deeds done, the needful words said at the crucial time, the positive PR in the outer world. Not to be watching one's moral investments for their anticipated return, but to act as if all these deeds and words both matter absolutely and matter not at all.
Which means, in short, that it's hard to know what what to do with any good repute, not that it's worthless but that it's worth so much to have done something to deserve it. And still one feels a bit stupid to have so little to say directly in return but "thank you"...