I wrote last week about the pandemic of perfectionism, a non-fatal but debilitating disease of the mind and heart. Well, there’s another “disease” that I have stumbled across a few times recently: The idea of being “useful.”
I am not opposed to being useful! :-) Serving the planet and our fellow humans is a wonderful thing to do for many reasons, not least of which is that it takes us out of ourselves. Being self-preoccupied is a recipe for being unhappy. But feeling that our worth comes from what we do or accomplish is an error with lasting and damaging consequences.
While it is appropriate and wonderful in many ways to render service to all those we meet, it is a mistake to become confused about what is the goal, and what is the means to an end. Our worth does not come from what we do. It comes from the very essence of who and what we are: A soul that has incarnated as a child of Spirit to learn what it needs to learn.
All of our woes come from a tightly held misunderstanding of who we are, or from misperceptions of what is really happening around us. This planet is set up to educate and entertain us (though sometimes I question Spirit’s sense of humor!). The world does not need us to fix it. Our serving is a way to purify our own consciousness, as it helps us to become less self-focused. But if we think things cannot survive without us, we are significantly mistaken.
So then, why the focus on what we are accomplishing or have accomplished? It’s because we forget we are a soul in a body, and our job is to merge with Spirit. The things that come to us are for our own education and benefit.
Helping others opens our hearts and broadens our sensibilities. It is entirely appropriate to render service, especially to ease suffering. But as we get older, very often the time comes for that to become less. Or perhaps life circumstances—health or whatever—preclude the level of service we would like to offer. Feeling “worthless,” “spent,” like a “has-been” is not only detrimental but counterproductive to our true purpose in being here. It is “missing the point” in a major way. The solution is to accept the new reality. Clinging to what is no longer is the opposite of helpful. The windshield is a better place to focus our attention than the rearview mirror.
"What lessons are there for me today?” is a wonderful attitude to carry. Start each day with your nose pressed against the glass, like a child seeing inside his favorite candy store. The world is a reflection of our own attitude, and thinking our worth comes from what we are doing is an attitude that will not serve us now, and especially not as we age. And for you younger folks out there, this attitude is good to start early, and hard to change once the wrong habit-ideas have taken root. Go change the world!… but never forget your true purpose.