“Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have.” – Ed Bradley
I have had that quote pasted on my monitor for a long time but lately it’s become sort of a mantra for me.
I’m coming out of an eighteen month stretch of pretty significant chaos around here.
There are saving grace aspects in all of this, of course. That’s the stuff that keeps us all going. I know I talk about California like it’s some magical kingdom, but as someone who wanted to live here forever, just knowing I got here when I never thought I would is pretty frickin’ sustaining, even on the worst of days. It reminds me that not everything that seems out or reach is- sometimes weird opportunities pop up and you have to grab them.
To me, that’s what luck is- it’s not so much magic and chance but being prepared and ready to spot any small opportunity and then feeling worthy and brave enough to go for it without hesitation. It’s basically confirmation bias, which is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.”
However, there is a tiny part of me that holds stock in the fact that not even the most gifted researchers and brilliant minds know everything about consciousness and the brain and the way the universe works, so who knows?
As far as being stressed out by the chaos, I think I’ve sort of hit a point in all of it where I desperately want *myself* back. I have been feeling this way for a while, like I’m being dragged behind life and just being pulled along for the ride rather than actually being in the midst of it and having some autonomy or space to make decisions on what every day holds. A part of me has become incredibly determined to force myself into it all and push to create some space for myself within it. Sort of like when someone sticks their hand into a closing elevator door and manages to bounce it back open again, if that makes any sense.
So that’s where I am now- at this junction of feeling motivated and fired up to make a small change, to do the “work”- to figure out what the heck it is I want life to look like, to go after it a bit. I just need to keep working on the “worthy” thing- the idea that it’s really okay for me to go for what I want, and that it’s not entitlement or being “spoiled” to want to have a fuller experience or to change some things for myself.
Self-worth is tricky, right? I grew up in a first generation Italian immigrant/post Roman Catholic family where the message of “if you get anything beyond suffering and poverty then you don’t complain” was kind of the main philosophy.
I was born with a rare form of Spina Bifida, (my lesion on the base of my spine had already healed when I was born, no brain issues, and my legs were kicking right away, but there was a bundle of nerves at the base of my spine that needed to be opened and untangled and “plugged back in”) and so my childhood was a ton of surgery and recovery and being used as a paper subject/teaching example, because all the hospitals in NY have teaching programs. So it was constant doctors undressing me in rooms full of people (almost always all men) and then being examined and poked and prodded and discussed for hours as if I was not a person, certainly not present, but instead I was just a vessel that held this weird anomaly of spinal stuff. That was pretty significant to my idea of self-worth- especially as a teenager.
And then in 2016 I started a two year intensive study of Buddhism- one post-grad year of online academia and then a year of intensive religious study (online via distance learning) with nuns at an abbey. Buddhism doesn’t exactly champion the idea of the “self” or “self worth”. I mean, of course it’s deeper than that, but you are sort of encouraged to dump self-esteem right away and get on with the program. To a lot of Buddhists, the human body and mind is basically just a sack of chemicals that gets more and more disgusting and then disintegrates and decays. Your past behavior determines what form you get next time around. Self-worth is not exactly their big focus. That tracked with my personal experiences, so I never really had an issue with it.
So coming out of those worlds, self-worth is super foreign and a sticky issue for me because it’s been drilled into me that it’s about ego, not not about just the idea of being a living creature that deserves to feel safe and not in distress. It took a lot of time and work for me to finally change my perspective on what self-worth means. There is tremendous suffering in the world, but EVERYONE deserves contentment, safety, well-being, etc. Everyone.
Maybe even me.
And my desire for some comfort, less pain, a little more ease and joy does not come at the expense of others unless I do believe there is sort of a limit to “okayness” in the universe, and me taking some for myself costs someone who needs it more. And that’s not the truth, nor do I believe it is. There’s more than enough to go around.
So “self-worth” went from being about ego and entitlement to being about how every living being on this planet deserves to be okay.
With that new working definition sort of hesitantly taking space in my brain, I’m starting to dip my toe into thinking about what I’d like my life to look and feel like, and the things I need to do to get closer to that. Hence the “be prepared [and] work hard” part of the quote above.
So that’s where I am – figuring out how to make space, and what I want to happen in that space, and then trying to be open and aware of any opportunities that might pop up.