Necessary Evils

      When I sit down to think about what necessary evils are, the first member to the mental party is always work. Work takes blunt force blame because for most of us, it is inescapable! Unless you’re rich, even those who love their job are stuck with a sucking reality of not having a choice in the matter. Yes it’s true, we can always find new jobs to up our level of happiness. But, to me, the level of happiness does not make it any less necessary nor any less evil.

      To dwell over lost time spent at work is akin to beating oneself up over 7 hour nights of sleep. Pointless acts. We have to work, we have to sleep, and we have to eat. Unfortunately, the necessary evils do not stop at the obvious; necessary evils run especially deep through vague tunnels of obscure meaning yet unpredictable consequence.

      If you’re not careful, it can be easy to mislead yourself into thinking that some necessaries are unnecessary.

     “If I could just be alone all the time, I could finally get some things done that I want to get done.”

      It’s a trap. And yes, this is where the levels of happiness marry the necessary evils, because keeping people in your life is very much both of these things. People are evil not just because they are unpredictable and unwieldy, but because they provide layers of unique inspiration that simply cannot be duplicated in any other way. And even if I could, EVEN IF, I could get by without them, my personality type is such that I’d never get any of my real goals accomplished anyway. Why?  Because I’d be too concerned about my people.

      This may sound like a blatantly obvious description of the self-actualization pyramid, and maybe it is. What I can say for sure is that I have spent more time than I’d like to admit, thinking that I don’t need a lot of the necessary evils in life, when the truth is, I literally cannot succeed without them.

Before you can publish a book you have to edit it.

Before you can edit a book, you have to write it.

Before you can write a book, you have to feel it.

Before you can feel anything, you have live it.