For, if we’re really going to give ourselves the best of ourselves, we have to be honest with the worst of ourselves.

Patience is where we realize that to rush something is to compromise it to its own destruction. Maturity is to realize that the most effective way to stop the destruction is by beginning to develop patience. And the first place that we need to do that is with ourselves.

Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?

In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves.

The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it’s translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.

In trying to prove ourselves to the world we are in fact trying to prove ourselves to ourselves. And if in fact there’s something that we need to prove, it’s that we don’t need to prove anything.

To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not.

Greed consumes everything that we are in the pursuit of everything that we don’t have. Therefore, to possess everything that the world has to offer but to have lost ourselves in the pursuit is to hold everything but to possess nothing.

And so to tame Christmas we spin myths to temper the story, we create our own caricatures to speak our own lines into the script, we gift ourselves to enhance an adventure now lagging, and we think we’re on a grand adventure when we’ve completely forgotten what an adventure is.