1. The Plain Girl - Chapter 6: Crash Recovery


    Date: 10/24/2017, Categories: Love Stories, Author: xreynolds, Rating: 4, Source: LushStories

    uncharacteristically cold. She paused here just for a moment, her face bearing a towering strong sobriety. It was a gaze that commanded serious attention but was as gentle and sweet as it ever had been. From her eyes flowed the same serene certainty that streamed into her words. “We make the mistake,” she softly continued, “of confusing the inadequacies of our personality with who we truly are. When we confront our shortcomings honestly, we begin to draw on resources from within. Your real strength does not flow along streams that trace back to your cleverness. You start to see that your cleverness is not so clever after all. These are resources that at first we never even knew were available to us. We discover them for ourselves when we are committed to the truth.” In all of this Claire never lost sight of the fact that she was drawing on such resources as she spoke. “There are many things we encounter in our experience of life that seem to be a let down. Often we let ourselves down. At times it is hard to keep going. But you should know by now that an honest search for the truth is the most reliable investment of all, because you are hitching yourself to the source of life itself. It is actually in you, or at least by striving for it in that way, you’ll find it there. Claire lightened up just a little. “Your distaste for where that silly girl has landed you is an expression of the stirring of that inner honesty. In our life, we often find ourselves in situations like this, ...
    but they are the culmination of the little choices we have made along the way. If we deal with them honestly, it doesn’t immediately eliminate the fool in us, but we get stronger and more able to bear just how foolish we can be. That is real strength. You really can acquire a distaste for kidding yourself. And that, little by little, reduces the influence that the fool has over us.” Claire paused for just a moment as she relaxed the grip on Karla’s hands. “In a certain regard you are right,” she continued. “I seem to be in possession of something more than you. But there was something that was passed to me, as I pass it to you, and that is conviction. It results from commitment to self-honesty and it yields clarity. It cannot be faked. We need first to recognize that there is a part of us that simply doesn’t want to hear the truth. When you begin to look at that silly girl for the phony that she is, then you stop trying to make her happy and you begin to live for the truth.” “Truth is not unintelligent. Our meager intelligence is flawed by that part of us that doesn’t want to hear the truth. That is stupid. If it were otherwise, life wouldn’t be so painful. So it is discomfortable to bear the truth sometimes- at first at any rate –but the alternative is far worse. Because you are going to suffer regardless, and get nowhere besides. All your energy goes into deceiving yourself or seeking of opiates. All that dynamic energy that is part of your special makeup, you can harness ...
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