Whenever I've gone to make a major decision, I've always asked the opinions of others. I've counted this tactic as wisdom and felt that it's important to look at a situation from all angles, including angles that I alone cannot always see. But recently I've been faced with the truth that I am the only person that can determine what I want and what is best for me. It may not always be easy to differentiate between what I want and what I need, what I feel and what should be done, but it is feasible. I was reading, "Reaching Out" by Henri Nouwen and these are a series of quotes that led me to this conclusion:
Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Frequently the temporary relief they offer only leads to a stronger recurrence of the same pains when we are again by ourselves. But sometimes we meet and hear that exceptional person who says: "Do not run, but be quiet and silent. Listen attentively to your own struggle. The answer to your question is hidden in your own heart."
...The real spiritual guide is the one who, instead of advising us what to do or to whom to go, offers us a chance to stay alone and take the risk of entering into our own experience. He makes us see that ouring little bits of water on our dry land does not help, but that we will find a living well if we reach deep enough under the surface of our complaints.
...Sometimes one wonders if the fact that so many people ask support, advice and counsel from so many other people is not, in large part, due to their having lost contact with their innermost self. They ask: Should I go to school or look for a job, should I become a doctor or a lawyer, should I marry or remain single, should I leave my position or stay where I am, should I go into the military or refuse to go to war, should oben my superior or follow my own inclination, should I live a poor life or gain more money for the costly education of my children? There are not enough counselors in the world to help with all these hard questions, and sometimes one feels as if one half of the world is asking advise of the other half while both sides are sitting in the same darkness.
Maybe the most important advice to all searching people is the advice that Rainer Maria Rilke gave to the young man who asked him if h should become a poet. Rilke says:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now...I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward and that avove all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest laces of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in teh stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmitive, if you may meet this earnest questin with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
...Unless our questions, problems and concerns are tested and matured in solitude, it is not realistic to expect ansers that are really our own.
This mindset is what has led me to make decisions on my own. I continually have the urge to find confirmation in the reassuring word of a friend, but I realise that I am the only who can answer my own questions. So when I feel insecure in a decision regarding myself and feel the urge to seek out a second opinion I have been firmly squashing that desire and doing what I think is best, or what I want. It's been liberating and confidence building. It's shaping in me an independence founded on a confidence and trust in myself. It's why I decided to change my major back to nursing without the guidance of others. Because only I could look into myself and decide what I want.
8/11/10
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