Even if I don’t see them reflected in the outside environment or situation, here are values nevertheless to help me through such situations and remind me of becoming myself:

1. Serenity.

To take a pause and wait for the right answer to come as it does. Stillness in dispersal and in quiet energy. Falling down into repose when expending energy into performing is the opposite way of course. Choosing my own, default, response when an ideally appropriate one suits. When i must be very quiet and very still inside, to know myself.

2. Faith

within intuitive uncertain knowing. Rather choosing to live inside imagined hypothesis and scenarios, unbidden knowing, defaulting to my own ordinary before seeing it first. Faith, to me myself, is not a leap of faith but rather a retreat back into my own knowing, consulting my own gut, which is where real bravery is truly resting in repose. Faith in gut in so much as knowing is mysterious.

3. Repose. To lie down and choose to die in lieu of anything else involving internal and emotional dishonesty. In uncertainty, in fear of not being enough, in solidarity, in pain in loneliness, rest.

There’s power, latent and deep and not kinetic, but potential energy in choosing resting in wait in alternative to choosing in action without knowing.

There is bold, yet unspoken, quiet energy, rock-hard stability given away in waiting on, in the practice of relaxing into, when intensity, sharpness, and unsure-ification strike and dismantle fucking hard, to continue to rest then on support for the unerringness of one’s own response to such demands.

4. The models to rely upon in need in the valley (energy in lack, attraction in gravity and inward void) of the univetse in lieu of the mountain of the world, and the child looked upon as the sage, in alternative to the beady adult, the stellar man, the warped and distinguished powerful matured individual begotten.

The Tao fellows refer to the child as a reference for the distinguished sage-in the beginning, before any other culturally received and conditioned sense of distinction, letting every kind of betterment and culturally receptive claim to becoming, fall loose. Rather look to maturation, in replacement look in the default start, the intuitive proceedings in obeisance not to “better” alternative “inward.”

Respond to life outside not with unknown and perhaps not necessary maturity, but clear, intuition-derived clarity and truth, inner living moved outward,

or in the simplest thing to speak into, model oneself before one’s learned behaviors, into immediate disclosure of self.

Rather modeling oneself after another outside of oneself in regards to fear of insufficiency and combating it with pride, be immediately childlike; what is the default imperative? What emotion, what feeling, what caution, and restraint bubbles forth as it comes? Take it, move it to the outside, submit to reversion back towards the beginning.

5. Letting go. Rather conventional letting go, the sensation of others peeling away as one draws on one’s own imperatives. It can be icy, it can be sweet, letting go of nonintuited answers and bittersweet assurances in substitution of oneself and taking on anxiety and fear in real time is hard. Submitting to one’s priormost sensativities and engagements in environmental temptation to be “better” is a fucking brutal volition to take.

Letting go instead of drawing in to “who I ought to be given this and that” is conscientious. In real time, with regards to sharp feelings and emotional uncertainty of behavior and self-worth, draw into oneself. Always back into oneself. That’s why it’s a fuckin’ practice and not a changing easy pill to become a better person in every situation, because that’s just not reality.

The option in lieu of letting go and drawing onto the environments’ cues and cultural values ‘to be’ and ‘to model after’ lead one after to have the wanted without really wanting it oneself.

The option alternate “solving” emotional uncertainty and fear outward with meted relaxation inward is uncertainty, more, in looking for the “best optional circumstance,” the dictations of being a capable fellow or a smart, relaxed person in a particular situation. Who knows that? In self-reclinement, letting go.

6. Faults and mistakes are not bad to hear and not bad to take and not bad to give. It is a part of knowing oneself. Nosce te ipsum-a reflection of all ones’ goods and bads. To not know the bads is to not know the goods, to not know the goods isn’t much better than regarding one’s reality as a complete stranger.

Shame is not being able to divest these manners of mode and weight to other people. Fear of divesting mistakes within oneself for ruining one’s own self esteem to oneself is a greater protraction of shame, a crippling form of incapacitation of the way in which one deals and bears witness to one’s own reactions to foolish and castigative behaviors.

To bear repeating; faults and mistakes are not bad to give, they are not bad to take, and they are not bad to take. Giving all oneself, as a function of intuitive-self-knowing and measuring the given response, is a form of receiving wounds rather than recognition, and in so and such, receiving vulnerability in turn rather than authority and permission in turn.

6. Value values and difference. They may feel constraining but that comes with the grain of being born an individual with individual life and individual receptivity to changing circumstances and to others’ words and behaviors. Permitting difference feels outwardly wrong and exposure-like, naked and unbecoming, especially when values themselves seem misaligned to the situation itself, that isn’t forthcoming nor simple-or simple, yet excruciatingly fucking demanding.

To value difference is to admit to being alone in essence. But the notion of sameness to an estimated proximate or universally seen identity is a damn illusion. Embracing it is a fiction taught by fiction, in books, literature, and movies, if not to speak of marketing and media at all. To not base a first date after Hugh Grants’ performance, read scenarios in Harry Potter, or the brooding allure of Edward Cullen or Gatsby, to resign oneself to dissimilarity, is bringing everything loveable on.

To be oneself is fucking lonely and tiresome. But it’s also easy and painfully bitter. It’s sexy and it’s absolutely revilesome. To keep so in changing spaces is a continuing practice, a long sequence of being. To remain and to remain and to remain is bravery itself; is unknowable, ordinary, nothing speakable, nothing to talk about. Nothing special can be special, if the case is that speciality is itself overvalued as excessive.

Only a middle distance runner knows how important his (his and her) role is, and it is a mark of world weary truth and unspeakable, nothing-much-confidence. To aspire to that isn’t so similar to aspiring at all. Sometimes loneliness is there, at the same places as truth.