And Two Become One

     Change is death.  Or at least that's what the majority of people believe.  In order to start a new diet, they have to kill of the old one.  To start exercising, laziness must die.  To quit a job, some violence (hopefully metaphorical) must occur.  In the most fundamental way people seem to feel the need to kill something, inside or out, in order to become stronger.
     I don't think this is the way of things, though, because those gremlins (someone else's coined term for inner monsters) never stay dead.  They always find  ways of manifesting themselves until the person is so tired of failing to change that they just give up.  For a while, because even the gremlin of change doesn't stay slaughtered long.
     But what if death and change are not one and the same?  An old diet may not need to die for a new one to live.  Instead, the old diet and the new one may be the same thing, the new inevitably growing from the old and able to come in no other way.  A difference, perhaps, more than a change.  Wonderful if true.
     The question then becomes;  why doesn't this happen?  It's practically the stuff of fairy-tales to say that a old crappy life can spontaneously become a new life resplendent with health and happiness.  But with all the killing going on, this is hardly surprising.  When you try to destroy the old you, you're hacking at the roots from which change and newness spring.  And it's a self-perpetuating cycle;  your effort to kill the you that is killing you is just more of the same.
     You don't need to stop killing so much as you need to stop believing in the power of death and violence to bring change.  Force begets force, but change comes through growth, not death.

The Meaning of being Meant for Greatness

     I have always thought of greatness as something great.  By that, I mean something that feels great, something that is awesome in the most literal sense of the word.  This might be flawed.
     "Meant for greatness" means that greatness is a forgone conclusion.  But if greatness is in my nature, then why should it be given any more credit than anything else I do?  I don't feel awe or wonder when I brush my teeth or eat a meal.  These are simple daily routines, things I do without thought and often without notice.  Perhaps the key to being great, as I am meant to be, is for greatness to become routine and below notice.  Greatness not as an effort towards something higher or an exaltation, but as a routine, an activity of great importance but little note.
     All my life, I've thought of greatness in terms of feelings.  When I act great or achieve something great, then I'm supposed to feel great.  But is that not the mark of the amateur, the novice, the less-than-great?  I don't think God, if he exists, would be in awe of His own greatness.  He would take it for granted as a given.  So if we are to be gods, then perhaps it is also necessary that we take no pride in or notice of our own greatness.  Perhaps the final secret of greatness is that it's not.