Know Thyself

People are always saying: "You need to understand others."

However, knowing yourself is the single most important thing you need to survive your life.

For example, my father said to me when I was 12: "You have to be the adult in the room because you are so big and tall for your age. You are a head taller than most people your age and because of this if someone makes you angry you might kill them. Therefore, you have to be the 'adult in the room' all the time and let no one get your goat."

My father was telling my young self something I needed to know which was that if I went out of control someone could easily die. Other boys who were big and strong like me might not have had fathers to tell them this and they might have killed someone by accident or on purpose and spent the rest of their lives in jail. 

I'm 72 so these kinds of things are important to know about yourself. So, whether others who are older and wiser are telling you things you need to know or whether you figure these things out for yourself, either way you need to know these kinds of things about yourself so you can survive your lives and so can everyone else. 

One of the most helpful things for me growing up was taking piano lessons like my 5 years older cousin who played piano in a combo of piano, singer and bass fiddle at that time around 1960. He is a lawyer with grandchildren now.

By coming home from school often angry at the way some kids were treating me and others verbally I could sit down and play all my pop music or classical songs given to me by my piano teacher and literally "calm down" at that time.

This was before abortions were legal and because of this you had many "Tortured" and mentally ill sadist types of people who had been tortured by their mothers who were forced to have them and forced to get married when they were date raped. So, many young people were sort of insane then from this and you had to deal with this type of tortured insanity in public Schools especially then.

So, even though Glendale, California likely had the best public schools at that time in Los Angeles county there were still the tortured people (some of them there) that made life difficult or impossible for many people then both in school and after school.

I never was put in a trash can and rolled down a hill because I could be dangerous too. But, because I had both parents who wanted me and who didn't drink or smoke and were ministers I was raised up right and so wasn't all screwed up like many people who would have been better off aborted by their mothers in the 1940s that what happened to them in life.

I think it goes something like this: 

1/3 of the people will survive and succeed no matter what in their lives.

1/3 of the people will succeed and survive given the right help.

1/3 of the people cannot succeed or survive no matter what is done for them.

This is the way it has always been here on earth.

It's mostly the last 1/3 that you have to watch out for that will kill or maim you when you aren't looking in life.

But, if you come to know yourself often you can learn how to avoid the "insane ones" who cannot be helped and who will one way or the other eventually self destruct. The lesson here is: "Don't let them kill you too along the way."

Luckily I was always in the top 2/3 of those who would or could succeed in life.

By God's Grace