My wife's a pretty smart lady: she certainly knows how to get me back on track with a few choice words.
All too often I exhaust myself with concerns about minutiae that don't matter. I can take a perfectly nice day and spin tiny incidents into major harbingers of pending disaster. I trip over a wrinkle in the carpeting and decide that the flawed flooring is a sign that buying this expensive house—that can't be sold for the mortgage owed—was a huge mistake and replacing the carpet is now impossible because I have zero excess cash flow and that is not going to change anytime soon, which means, I've failed to live a simple, virtuous life and now I'm a slave to material things that are ruining my quality of life instead of improving it, but I don't have any answers to get myself out of this so I'm doomed to eternal entrapment and suffering no matter how I try to wriggle free.
Yes, I am as nutty as a pecan tree in September. No, this really did not happen; but something pretty close to it did, and continues to happen on an all too often basis.
So how does Judy shift me back on the right course? Two simple words: higher purpose. It's not about what I've done wrong or my missed opportunities; and it's especially not about what I've done right. Regardless of my definition of "worthy," it's about continuing to move forward because what I do is meant for a higher purpose than I can know or understand. If that's true, then everything I do is designed to affect someone else. It's not about me (oh, poor me and my financial foul-ups) and it's not about how successful I am at delivering the next great software product. The software may not sell, the business may bust and I might fail financially, but someone may be saved from suffering because of my experiences. I just may never know if or when this happens. I have to keep getting back up and moving forward assuming that the higher purpose is being fulfilled.
So how's the company launch coming along? Actually, everything is pulling together rather nicely. I'm in the final stages of debugging my software, the feature set is complete, the company logo is done and so is most of the polish on the product. I just have to finish the web site and implement a purchase system for the software to complete the launch. You'd never know it by the way I'm behaving, but an objective observer would probably give me high marks for staying on schedule and focused. Captain Nuttree would tell you that everything is tearing apart at the seams, but why would anyone listen to a loon like him. Instead, just ask my wife, keeper of the Hoctor household sanity: She'll tell you that the higher purpose is being satisfied.
