Ego and how it’s changed for me

I’m not done yet.

I realized after my last post that, if I was going to complain, and that’s what it was, I needed to be better balanced in my complaint. My complaint was my persistent feelings of loneliness and sadness. The post was about how their impact has diminished. And complaining. My acknowledgement of this is an improvement.

Another thing I’ve noticed is my diminished ego, and my aversion to doing things that feed it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got an ego and I’m often oblivious to its workings, it’s just that now I’m more aware, and I think it has less of an influence on me than it has in the past. For example, during previous travel, I had a little too much to drink and was mindlessly talking. At some point I noticed that what I was saying I judged to be egocentric. I was tooting my own horn, or I was getting ready to. I was talking to make myself sound better. I stopped mid sentence and froze. I didn’t say another word. The group probably thought I had blown a fuse. I guess I did. That talk is not for me anymore.

Another thing I noticed was that my tolerance for the system has become very strong. The public face of the system being politics. Ever since the Clinton blow job scandal, I’ve seen the corruption and ugliness that is our political system, and the hate and ignorance that is the electorate. Since then I’ve tried to speak out against it, and when that failed, I tried sitting quietly waiting for the end, more content than Cassandra to watch the country circle the drain. Then I realized that the end has been coming for my entire life. If the world is ending, there’s very little I can actually do to prepare. So I asked myself, do I want to live my life attending to that? Or is it good enough to spend some time thinking about it, processing it, planning for it, and then relinquish that concern and go about my daily life knowing that I am as prepared as I can be. I still believe our government was bought and paid for before I was born, but it is not important to me that it gets fixed. It is important to me to interact with people in a positive way when discussing it.