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Today's
Meditation:
When we're kids, it's only natural that we look to
others for our security. After all, we're pretty
defenseless on our own. If we were left to our own
devices, it's pretty obvious that we would die pretty
quickly. But that's when we're very young-- when do
we reach the point at which we find our security in
ourselves? At what point do we learn that something
like a sense of security could not and should not come
from someone else? (Not talking about, of course,
people who live in dangerous areas and who may depend on
paid security people.)
When we seek our security in someone else, we put an awful
lot of pressure on them, pressure that no one else really
deserves to have. We also undermine our own feelings
of self-reliance and self-respect. If we don't feel
comfortable with who we are and what we do, we may try to
find our security outside of ourselves, in our bank
accounts, in other people, in our work, in the homes that
we buy, in the material objects that fill those homes, in
the insurance policies on which we spend so much money.
But what does it mean to be "secure in our own
soul"? I think it means to trust ourselves to
do what's best for others, and not to allow the reactions,
actions, and criticisms of others to affect our decisions
about our own lives. We don't allow those things to
affect how we feel about ourselves. We don't allow
those things to affect how we treat others.
Our culture wants to teach us to build up the security
outside ourselves, and then work on the inner sense of
security. Unfortunately, our culture has it
backwards, and also unfortunately, we tend to pay a bit
too much attention to what our societies teach us.
We must make the transition from getting our sense of
security from others to getting it from ourselves, for
that's where the only true security comes from.
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