How can I say that it's not about me without sounding self-righteous and pretentious?  How can I truly believe it's not about me without secretly feeling pride in my faux humility and haughty at my superior spirituality?

Why on earth are we called to this horrible quandary of being called to honor God by using our talents, yet required to remember that our talents are entirely beside the point?  That anything we do is utterly worthless but for God's blessing, guidance, protection and action. 

IT IS NOT ABOUT ME.

It's not about "rigorous self improvement".  How stupid!  How Aristotelian!  How utterly beside the point!  I knew that there was something wrong about this profound interest in self-help.

Because anyone who I've met who's interested in "rigorous self-improvement" is also primarily interested in the "self" portion of that equation.  They would rather go to the gym than meet a friend for coffee, because the friend doesn't improve the self. 

Where is the divide between doing your best and doing your best?  Doing the best for you? 

You know, God doesn't really care if I'm not an athlete.  He doesn't really care that I can't wear size 6 jeans.  He doesn't really care if I can speak five languages, or if I flunked my math midterm, or if I aced my physics midterm.  HE DOESN'T CARE. 

The part of that that God cares about?  The part that's me.  God probably cares when I deceive myself into thinking I'm working as hard as possible when He and I both know that I waste time in stupid ways.  He probably cares that I could have studied harder for calc, and didn't because I was lazy.  He probably cares that I ate the extra cookie because I just wanted it.  He probably cares that I'm self-satisfied and self-confident and self-rigteous.

Self, self, self.  Self.  Self. Self self self.

How bizarre.  This concept of self-ness.

Oh, I'm still in the cave.  I'm free from the neck shackle, turning my head around to be blinded by the little fire of my own "clever" discoveries, bragging to others about the "reality" that I know of the objects casting the shadows into the narrow sphere of my experience.  Whenever Christ comes along and offers to unlock my chains, to bring me into the light, I refuse.  I call him a crazy man, one who doesn't see life as it really is.  He obviously doesn't understand the pain, the poverty, the business of this reality.  So naive, this Christ.

How I am foolish.  How I am blind.  And how much I refuse to see the light.

Luckily, the first step to freedom is realizing you're sitting in chains.

I get this compulsion to write at the most inconvenient times.  The words come to mind and if I don't have a keyboard or a paper to put them on, they write themselves in my brain, metaphors intact, and stick there until they get out or are forgotten.  Now, for instance.  I walked across campus, on my way to class , and the compulsion hit.  It was stronger than usual, and this time it won't be put off so maybe I'll even be late for class because of it.

I'm struck with my utter normalcy, today.  How much am I not unique!  I was reading for class and thinking what I thought were great and wonderful thoughts.  Then I realized that every student (in the  larger sense of the word) has thought those thoughts while reading Plato.  For thousands of years, people have thought them and begun to believe that they had made a great discovery, when in fact, they were just scouring the already beaten path to a many times plundered treasure.

then I was walking across campus and thinking cliched thoughts about fall and the changing of the leaves and the rhythm of life and yada yada yada.  Why are these discoveries so new to each individual as we make them?  Why do we not accept it when we are taught them, like we accept that pluto is (or was) the 9th planet from the sun?  We don't need to discover that for ourselves.  We couldn't really.

Then I started wondering why my insignificance and non-uniqueness (as it were) matters at all.  I'm just a girl, who thinks thoughts that thousands (millions, even?) before her have thought.  Who am amazed by the same things that have amazed billions before her.  I'm not an Aquinas, or an Augustine, or a Decartes, or a Newton, or even a Rand, or a Karouac, or all those who (in my great wisdom, to be sure) judge to be the petty celebrity thinkers of our day. 

How do those even come into being?  I just get the impression that everyone is mostly the same.

And I, like millions before me, am late for class.