This week's topic for SAT Guidance is "How to deal with yourself". At first, I was wondering, "How can you deal with yourself? To deal with something is to react to something that has happened. But how can you react to yourself? You are yourself." This was the surface-thinker talking.
But then I started concentrating on going below the surface and I focused on being the scholar that I know I am. Thus I came to the conclusion that, yes, you can, in a way, deal with yourself. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, first I will say how I got to the previous conclusion and the error I saw in the latter thought process. The way I arrived at the first conclusion was through this quote I had heard: "Look at the sunset. it may be your last, as the world around you ends forever. denial is useless, acceptance is weak. All you can do is go on." .
I contemplated this last thought. "All you can do is go on". I was thinking that once you do something, you can't react against yourself, because you yourself knows what you are doing, and doing the thing itself is the reaction. That really, the only choice you do have is to just simply go on in defeat. Confused? Yes, me too. The following is the error in the latter extensive thought process. The fact I was leaving out is that once you do a certain thing, there's always a result of it, and you react to that result. .
To put it simply, I was thinking,"How can I react to myself", when I should have been thinking,"How do I react to what I do to myself." I've learned through watching people, and by reading, and observing and analysizing soceity on a whole, that humans have this instinct to hurt themselves. As I remember hearing from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a great writer in the transcendalist era, that out of all the pains we bestow upon ourselves, the majority is self-inflicted. .
Most of what we pain ourselves over is really quite avoidable.
