Humility

"The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery—not over nature but of ourselves." — Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

"… most of our energy goes into upholding our importance … if we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe." — Carlos Castenada, The Art of Dreaming

To realize that our small home in this vast universe is but a tiny speck of dust taking flight upon the infinite cosmic winds is to see our lives in some perspective. If the size of the earth alone is enough to humble us, to look out at the expanses of stars in every direction is to have the fact driven home.

As human beings trapped in our own heads, it's very difficult to escape the self-consciousness of this arrangement. All of our senses are personal and localized, all of our thoughts and feelings are contained within our own conscience. We would be fools not to concern ourselves with the relatively trivial details of our life.

At the same time, however, it is hard from within this maelstrom to maintain a sense of perspective and detachment. All around us: cell phones are ringing, friends are talking, all kinds of demands on our attention are competing for our time and energy. These demands and stresses can overwhelm our thoughts and unbalance our emotions. Worse yet, over time these patterns can create rigidities and habits that can become our masters and keep us from our true potentials.

The word humility comes from the Latin, humilis, with the connotation of being "of the earth." Humility has been revered in spiritual traditions for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, for the sense of perspective and clarity that comes when one is able to step out mentally from their own limited self-interest to see things in a larger context.

Immanuel Kant, viewing humility as "that meta-attitude which constitutes the moral agent's proper perspective on himself as a dependent and corrupt but capable and dignified rational agent," suggests a central place in a larger system of ethics through which human beings can hopefully become capable of compassionate and thoughtful action towards others.

In this digital age, with email, youtube, myspace, facebook and even blogs like this one, it's easy to lose a wider perspective of the world outside of the network and to become enmeshed within a web of self-promotion and isolation. The reflections of ourselves in the digital realm have a certain hypnotizing power, and the limited circles of contact are capable of trapping us within artificial mazes of our own creation.

It requires a serious effort to maintain this sense of perspective in our lives, even on the best of days. Particularly when one is driven by the feeling that everyone else seems to be getting ahead or taking what could have been ours. I know this feeling all too well. I fight with it almost daily. It is difficult to step back, to take a deep breath, and to realize that we sometimes need to let those feelings go. We would do well to learn to trust ourselves and our own vision, and our own pace.

We are not in a race with anyone else, whether they did this thing or that or were recognized for this thing or other. To chase this kind of recognition can only disfigure our own unique language. We are who we are, we have what we have, and we can learn to work with this in our own way. We each have a personal voice inside of us and this voice can speakly humbly and proud.

Humility is not to count one's worth as nothing, but to count it with an understanding of its true value, to yourself and to the people you care for. The media would like to sell us all the idea that fame is what we should all want to seek and that it is the ultimate recognition of your value as a person. How convenient for the ones who have ad time to sell!

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got." — Janis Joplin

"Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." — Helen Keller, The Simplest Way to be Happy