Your heart and the most essential truth, so says this heart

The most important wrestling we do in our life, I'm convinced, at this point, is the wrestling we do with ourselves. With our conscience. With our dreams. With our fears and insecurities. With our hearts. With our minds.

And at the end of all of that, if we're wise, I think, is making what can be better - in our lives and in the lives of other around us - better. For real.

And out of that wrestling is our best. Each of us. The best we have to offer. For ourselves and for everyone else.

The rest - the fighting, the threatening, the hurt imposed, the will to overpower, the self-centered efforts to get our way at the expense of others, the use of fear and force, except when real danger is present (and distinguishing between what is real and what is not is the essence of the strongest efforts to wrestle with one's conscience) - these are all both fruitless and self-involved.

And like all fruitless and self-involved things in the world, they make our lives worse rather than better.

We are welcome to them. And we are welcome to their consequences. And whether we take responsibility for the consequences or not, we are responsible for them.

But the real and wonderful opportunities in life, for ourselves and for others, come from wrestling with oneself and one's own thinking and acting in the world.

And once you've done that, the world is really not all that difficult to navigate, at all. It is just a matter of to thy own heart being true, as the English poet would say.

And no other greater wisdom could be truer. Until it proves itself otherwise to that same heart. As a matter of fact. And as a matter of fact of how the world should be.

And that is the most essential truth of any life. So says this heart.