September 18
These days in Crested Butte will be busy. WFR class ran from 8:30 to nearly 6:00 today. Then I came back home, socialized with Mom, who has flown out to stay with me for awhile, ate dinner and began my reading for class. Now that I have finished reading it is 10:30, and if I am to get 8 hours of sleep my day is nearing its close. But before bed, a couple notes on the seemingly concussed contents of my cranium. Introspection always makes a scary bedtime story.
I have been on the lookout for my Current Principal Character Flaw (CPCF) for some time now. My personality being as it is, I always have some lurking vice awaiting discovery, much like rednecks always have lawn ornaments lurking in their yards – they could have flamingos, ceramic deer or rusting automobiles, but you know there’s something hiding under the grass. Like a redneck whose weeds have grown too high, I have had trouble pinpointing my CPCF of late. And because I had not yet isolated the vice, I subconsciously doubted its existence and I’m afraid my sense of self-worth became recently inflated. I’m afraid I became self-righteous. Self-righteousness is a dangerous thing. To quote Carl Jung, “[W]e find, as the pious Henry Drummond once observed, that it is highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their relatives.”
This afternoon, as I was driving back from WFR class to my family’s condo, I listened to my thoughts ricochet around the cab of the truck, as is my usual practice. Today some of my thoughts were downright ugly. Now I will tolerate a personal reflection of questionable beauty (an open-mindedness born of necessity), but I abhor a shabby mindset. An unkempt mind is a reparable problem. My CPCF, I discovered, is selfishness.
That seems obvious. In retrospect, diagnosing me with selfishness should have been no more difficult than diagnosing the Marlboro Man with emphysema. But in this respect I don’t think I’m too far behind the rest of the world. It is always difficult to see our real faults – misdiagnoses of personal vices are as common as stolen Alabamian flamingos. As Hermann Hesse has written, “Nothing is more painful for a man than to take the path which leads to himself.”
Now I have only to fix the problem, but that may not be easy. Isolating the CPCF helps, but just because I’ve found the Chevy hiding under the weeds doesn’t mean I have the means to move it.
I have been on the lookout for my Current Principal Character Flaw (CPCF) for some time now. My personality being as it is, I always have some lurking vice awaiting discovery, much like rednecks always have lawn ornaments lurking in their yards – they could have flamingos, ceramic deer or rusting automobiles, but you know there’s something hiding under the grass. Like a redneck whose weeds have grown too high, I have had trouble pinpointing my CPCF of late. And because I had not yet isolated the vice, I subconsciously doubted its existence and I’m afraid my sense of self-worth became recently inflated. I’m afraid I became self-righteous. Self-righteousness is a dangerous thing. To quote Carl Jung, “[W]e find, as the pious Henry Drummond once observed, that it is highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their relatives.”
This afternoon, as I was driving back from WFR class to my family’s condo, I listened to my thoughts ricochet around the cab of the truck, as is my usual practice. Today some of my thoughts were downright ugly. Now I will tolerate a personal reflection of questionable beauty (an open-mindedness born of necessity), but I abhor a shabby mindset. An unkempt mind is a reparable problem. My CPCF, I discovered, is selfishness.
That seems obvious. In retrospect, diagnosing me with selfishness should have been no more difficult than diagnosing the Marlboro Man with emphysema. But in this respect I don’t think I’m too far behind the rest of the world. It is always difficult to see our real faults – misdiagnoses of personal vices are as common as stolen Alabamian flamingos. As Hermann Hesse has written, “Nothing is more painful for a man than to take the path which leads to himself.”
Now I have only to fix the problem, but that may not be easy. Isolating the CPCF helps, but just because I’ve found the Chevy hiding under the weeds doesn’t mean I have the means to move it.
posted by Jeb Butler at 7:01 PM
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