How lacking insight leads to empty successes.

I have been avoiding this for sometime…avoiding settling in with myself and really thinking about how my life has gone. It seems like only moments ago I was portraying myself as a lonely rider silhouetted on an empty sky. My mind drifted with the words and melody that goes like “My heroes have always been cowboys…”

My heroes have not actually been cowboys, but it seemed to be an apt pseudo-dramatization of how I have considered my life. Between the many distractions, including work, that I have managed for myself I was the lonely rider unable to develop any lasting relationships. It wasn’t what I wanted… but it was what I got. I am now thinking that I found (or did not find) what I have (or do not have) because I pursued the wrong standard.

Back to the analogy of the old west…the “standard” is the pennant carried by the Calvary. Like a long shot in the movies with all of the riders hidden by the hill, all you can see is the top of the pennant bobbing along. Too far to make out any details, but knowing that it was attached to a pole, held by a rider sitting on a horse, and leading a company of riders. However, they were always moving away from me…just over the hill, and just out of range to hear my cries for help. As I chased along they kept their distance, the pennant bobbing against the open sky. In my pursuit, I continued to find the nothingness ahead of me. The standard I pursued was perfection. Always just out of reach. Always a not-completely-definable pennant, just over the horizon.

As I chased along, I left my path strewn with the bodies of imperfection that I had crushed in my undaunted pursuit with absolute certainty of the righteousness of my quest. It was my own personal crusade…as well meaning, but as misdirected and deleterious as the original crusades. My misdirected quest has left me with the same loneliness with which I began. What I missed along the way was a real sense of fulfillment. Not because I did not succeed in some worthy enterprises, but because the values I pursued were not the values that I really needed to realize. I needed happiness, but I chose success. I needed friendship, but I demanded perfection. I needed to allow myself to discover who I really was, but I pushed myself to achieve things that I imagined would attain the parental approval that would never come, at least not in the way I was thinking.