Acceptance and Rejection

You have to be honest with yourself at all times. Denial and self-deception may be useful in the short term, but always harmful to oneself in the long run.

When you face rejection, you have to ask yourself if the rejection has any basis or simply the case of misperception. If it is from misperception, then you must proceed to an inquiry whether you contributed to the misperception. But most humans don't operate on that process of reasoning. They get bent out of shape when they are rejected. They automatically find all kinds of reasons and excuses to justify their self-worth. They are afraid to look at the possibility that they are rejected because they don't have much or even nothing to offer to the relationship, whatever the relationship may be, be it romance, friendship, commerce, or politics.

You have come to a conclusion that humans tend to think better of themselves than they deserve. On the other hand, very few humans think less of themselves than they are actually worth.

And then we have the issue of death which is the greatest equalizer. All of us have to die some day. You seriously doubt most humans take the trouble to really think what they live for. Most humans just struggle to live for no other reason that to die presents them with a finality so decisive that they don't want to think about the demise of their existence which came into being by chance anyway, a chance encounter between an egg and one sperm from one hundred million competitors. From that chance encounter came first a single human cell which kept on dividing until it became a trillion-cell apparatus that inquired, joked, lied or, in your case, wrote poems and stories and essays and speculated about philosophy, religion, and politics while having a choice to navigate in one of the four languages and having some reading comprehension of several more. When the end comes, you know all the particles that constituted you will return to randomness while folks whose minds were brainwashed by early indoctrination fancy that they will live again in heaven as they will be "saved" by some carpenter who came to earth 2,011 years ago.

Most humans neglect to strive for real, beneficial, lasting achievements. And yet in the back of their minds they are nagged by a hard question of what legacy they will leave behind. After all, they don't want to live like a dog or a hog or a log by the side of the road: here today, gone tomorrow, no memory, no impact, no meaning, completely inconsequential, utterly useless, absolutely insignificant.

You have a feeling that a certain comrade of yours will die with some satisfaction that his life was not in vain because he did live for others and that his life was not entirely consumed by self-interest and selfishness.

Roberto Wissai