Wrestling with my thoughts

Ultimately, blaming someone else for your troubles is a waste of time. Worse than a waste in fact, as it poisons you and makes your soul whirl with revenge. This desire for revenge is insidious. It touches all kinds of things in our value sets that don't seem related at all. But it's cancerous. The more the urge is indulged, which includes thinking about it, the more it spreads and corupts our entire spirit. Rooting out the will to revenge is difficult, as it ends with rooting out faith in the morality of the universe, the purest, deepest poison of the soul. As far as blaming others goes, it makes more sense to fix the things that you can fix, complain when it accomplishes something, and remember the value of not noticing things.

A parable: two climbers are scaling the frigid heights of a mountain. The first climber slips from a ledge and is barely snatched by the second climber. As the first climber dangles by his hand over the precipice, the second climber wracks his brain to come up with a way out of the predicament. The second climber then notices that the first climber is not even breathing heavily. "Don't you think you should be a little more worried," the second climber shouts, "you've got a real problem here!" "Alas, my friend, my situation could hardly be simpler, I can do nothing but hold on. I fear it is you who has the problem."

The stricture: Know your boundaries.