What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

by James Hollis

The problem with our lives is that the stunted vision that our complexes, conditioned attitudes, and adaptive reflexes repeat lacks imagination. That is why our psyche protests and we are summoned to reconsideration by

If you, the reader, find a neurosis that works for you, and gifts others as a bonus, then ride it for all it’s worth. We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being.

Ask yourself of every dilemma, every choice, every relationship, every commitment, or every failure to commit, “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”

The truth is, all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity.

Our maturational process is directly linked to the capacity to progressively handle ambiguity, discomfiting as it may prove. In fact, the test of psychological, political, social, and spiritual maturity is found precisely in the capacity of any person to tolerate ambiguity.

The efficacy of a democracy certainly depends on opposition, for any one-sidedness proves totalitarian quickly. The maturity and differentiated capacity of our personality depends on respecting ambiguity, without which we would never grow, never question, never move out of the old certainties that once offered comfort, but in time only ratify ignorance and oblige constriction.

An ability to tolerate the anxiety generated by ambiguity is what allows us to respect, engage, and grow

Unchallenged conviction begets rigidity, which begets regression; but ambiguity opens us to discovery, complexity, and therefore growth.

It has been said that the best treatment plan for loneliness is solitude. In solitude one is not alone; one is present to oneself, from whence a goodly conversation may emerge.

All of us have to ask this simple but piercing question of our relationships, our affiliations, our professions, our politics, and our theology: “Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?”

Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.