I came across this quote as I was catching up on world events this morning.
“Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.â€
– Lucille Ball
The fact that I grew up watching Lucille Ball made this even more special for me.
I have heard this idea before and am still trying to make this my own mantra. “I love getting up in the morning, because I always learn something new†has been my go-to mantra for decades. Yet loving myself has been elusive at best.
Sometimes I’m OK with myself, but it never lasts.
And OK is way different than loving myself as I am. I suppose when I think about it, I have been OK with myself when things are going well. When I am focused on a goal or a project, all of my energy goes into that. This leaves no time to “love me.†Of course, I must be at least OK with myself for the thing I am focused on to come true.
Going through the motions, I am again feeling just OK.
When I am not driving myself, my love for myself is even less secure. I get the sense that somewhere it may be important, but I am not sure why. My legacy will not be solving global warming or being the first human to walk on the moon. So many of us will live normal lives, without the notoriety. We will never hob-nob with the likes of Edison, or Roosevelt, or Einstein.
But this doesn’t make us less important.
While the world may not know our names, our family does. There may be siblings, parents, Aunts, and Uncles. I know people who have 100’s of cousins. There are stepparents, second cousins, and the occasional Gruncle.
Even if we never know who they are, we all have parents.
Somewhere, two souls came together, and we are the result. Just because I know who my parents are doesn’t make me any more special than someone who was put up for adoption at birth and never knew their birth parents. I am no more special than someone who was in the care of the state until their 18th birthday.
We all started out as babies and grew into the people we are today.
Some of us understand how to love ourselves. I wish I could say that was me. Yet all I can say with confidence is that there are times when I don’t suck. There are times where I am feeling in control and focused on whatever is in front of me. This could be landing a promotion at work, raising three children, or being a good husband.
It never dawned on me that I was “loving myself†when I got things done in this world.
Thinking about this concept, I can see what is going on, at least for me. I see that whenever I am on a mission, I clearly see the end result. And I focus on this and exclude anything that does not get me closer to that goal. And for me, loving myself was not the key point of whatever I was focusing on.
Recently, I trekked to the summit of Kilimanjaro in Africa.
At 19,341 feet above sea level, things were in focus. But what I realized was I had done this as much for my children as I did it for me. Making sure they were ok, that they were safe. All of this ran through my mind on the 6-day trek.
Ok, so some of it was about me and making sure I reached the summit.
Yet somehow, I never doubted I would reach the summit, I just knew it would happen. And it did. And my children and an incredibly good friend of the family made it, too. In that moment, everything involved in getting us to the summit faded into the background.
I did not feel I was “loving myself first,†but inside I was feeling proud.
Because of my depression, my sense of joy didn’t pop out and put itself on display. Yet there I was, standing at the highest point in Africa. Yet this sense of success turns out to be the same thing I felt when I turned in homework in elementary school. Or the night of my senior prom.
These are times where I was satisfied with my performance, or happy to be where I was in that moment.
I must have been loving myself first. It’s just that there was so much going on, it was hard for me to single out love of self from the other emotions swirling around. If trivial things can make me happy, then bigger things seem possible. Yet mostly I think of events as all in a day’s work. So, I made it to Africa and to the summit of Kili. But I also finished period 9’s budget and was within 100 dollars of plan last Saturday when we did almost $600,000 in sales.
It’s just my job, I’m supposed to do that.
Mostly, that is how I feel. I am not doing anything special. I am just doing my job. It could be being a parent, or making it to the summit of Kilimanjaro. Both of these are things I signed up for. Both are things I must be successful at. And both things I know will be successful.
