Here’s a picture of me from 1990 when I was visiting Quebec with friends of mine from college - Simon, Christine, myself, Simon and Damon.
Recently I learned that Simon on the left, passed away from Multiple Sclerosis, a condition that he had been diagnosed with just after he returned to the UK from our road-trip across Ontario, Quebec and NY state. When I saw the picture and heard the news, it reminded me of chapter 12 from The Book of Ecclesiastes.
And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
To me, seeing this picture reminded me of how much we forget that our lifetime here is limited, and that for most of us by the time we get an inkling of mortality that shakes us out of our shadow of vanity, then we find it’s too late to take action for us.
Death is the great leveller of vanities. Our addiction to drama hides in our shadow of vanity.
My latest book has the title, “Fight for your freedom or die trying” because I’m making a call to action to invest in your emotional health and wellbeing.
Hearing that we had lost Simon to MS triggered me off.
I felt outrage, blame and frustration that there was nothing we could do, to make it right for the family he left behind.
The drama hidden in my shadow of vanity had jumped out at me, and I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights.
The fears in my shadow of vanity had me in their grip of outrage, rescuing and blaming. Outrage that his life had been cut short, frustration that there was nothing I could do to help his family and blaming the disease.
These are the fears that are hidden in our “shadow of vanity” - and if they remain unchecked then we become reckless, entitled and cruel.
Anger makes us reckless and impulsive, frustration drives us to blame ourselves and others, and entitlement drives us to be heartless and cruel to ourselves and others.
The fears I’m talking about here are fear of rejection, fear of being wrong and fear of being excluded.
Fear of rejection taught me to stay quiet when my mother or grandmother were triggered into outrage. But the suppressed anger drove me to be reckless.
Fear of being wrong taught me that my mother and grandmother were entitled to sacrifice my emotional health and wellbeing in order for them to be ‘right’. I spent years blaming myself by asking “what the f*** is wrong with me?”
Fear of being excluded taught me that cruel and unusual punishments by my mother or grandmother were ‘good for me’. I believed that they were entitled to punish me, and I stopped loving myself because I thought I wasn’t good enough and deserved to be punished. I was cruel to myself and others.
When we realise that these fears are what trigger us into our drama - then we become more self-aware and we improve our quality of consciousness simply by observing how we are triggered off.
What enables us to expand our capacity for consciousness is by philanthropy. Getting involved in supporting those in the community suffering from hardship exposes us to a whole set of problems that we don’t have. In the realisation that we’re able to make a difference to someone else’s life, we also get to level-set our own problems and realise how they’re much more problems of our own vanity.
This expands our capacity for consciousness, and gives us the license to choose our problems. The anger that triggers us to be reckless, the frustration that triggers us to blame and the entitlement we have to punish ourselves and others melts away.
I’m raising money for charity right now - through selling signed-copies of my latest book. If you’d like a signed copy mailed to you anywhere in the world, then they will be available until 13 September when I’m launching the audio-edition of my new book.
To buy a copy, head to my website www.justinlodge.com
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