The Pecan Park Eagle

1. The Sweet Spot of Life. Hit life on the sweet spot of your passions for service and/or creativity and don’t waste time worrying about where the ball is going to land. If it clears the fence, it clears the fence. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. And if you miss completely, so be it. There’s always your next time at bat and another chance to give it a shot.
2. Watch Out for the Boo-Birds. Never allow the voice of the critic to get in the way. We never please everybody, especially among the boo-bird chorus of those who live to be critical or find fault with the efforts of those who take the creative risk.
3. The Internal Critic. Above all others, silence the protests of the internal critic that only wants to limit effort and restrain energy from any endeavor which contains the risk of failure, and that “protectiveness” just about covers the waterfront of all human choice. If you do listen to the internal critic in a kind of perfectionist way, you will live a life that fast converts the simple act of getting out of bed in the morning into something that is too risky.
4. See Life as a Box of Crayons. Remember what you did as a kid when you first saw a box of crayons? Depending on how old you were, you may have had to first figure out that they didn’t taste very good before you even got to the point of trying to color with them. Then you really had to experiment with different colors before you worried too much about staying between the lines. As with crayons, we can’t eat life, but we can find the colors we want to use in making our particular contributions to the picture of life. We simply have to be open to the exploration.
5. Live for What’s True. If your path is true, the energy of the truth will pull you along with it. If your path is false, the weight of the lie will pull you down with it. Take the advice of Shakespeare to heart when he said: “To thine own self be true.”
6. Watch Out for The Tail that Wags the Dog. In America, we pretty much have to get this lesson in check by age 16 or forget about it. We borrow big money to go to college, often forcing a career choice that is now based more upon our perceived income potential than it is our aptitude or deep interest in our new field of academic choice. Tack hard onto the debt board a post-graduate marriage, a first home mortgage, a couple of luxury cars, a slew of new high tech electronic gadgetry, and a couple of kids, and the pot is now completely stirred for a life that moves mostly or only as the tail wags the dog.
7. Don’t Confuse Your Ego with Your Calling. The subject here is your emotional energy and how you spend your time. If it’s something that you mainly do for the sake of getting validation from others, it’s ego. If it’s something you do because it simply feels good to give of yourself in this way, it’s your calling. The ego pursuit of validation is simply another form of dependency upon acting only for the approval, attention, and/or adoration of others. To act in the name of our calling is a step toward freedom and self-fulfillment.
8. Love vs. Lust. Love is anything we give to life without any expectation of credit, compensation, or validation in return. Lust is anything we pursue because we fear we cannot live without it. In love, we find the wings to fly. In lust, we find the chains that bind.

(Originally written by the late Bill McCurdy in 2010 — this was an unpublished draft discovered in 2021 while trying to get his blog back online. Let’s see if this works.)

This entry was posted on May 7, 2021 at 5:17 am and is filed under Words of the Wise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.