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Fathers of the fatherless children, open your eyes and know your presence is very critical. Be your son’s hero and let him know he can conquer the world. Be your daughter's first knight in shining armor. Be a part of your son’s and daughter’s success instead of their pain.
”
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Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
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Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.
”
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Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding)
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Dear Fathers of the Fatherless Children: Do you know your sons and daughters are AMAZING? They are full of life and they are truly a blessing. Your sons and daughters need you in their lives. How is it possible that at the beginning of the day when you open your eyes, your children are not on your priority list? Fathers of the fatherless children, your sons and daughters crave your presence and your support. They want you in their lives more than you will ever know. There isn’t such a thing as a part-time father; your children shouldn’t be treated as toys that you can throw in the closet when you are tired or when the going gets rough. Your sons and daughters are human; they should feel loved and nothing less at all times. You say you love your children, but actions speak louder than words; stand up and be a father to your sons and daughters. Fathers of the fatherless children, open your eyes and know your presence is very critical. Be your son’s hero and let him know he can conquer the world. Be your daughter's first knight in shining armor. Be a part of your son’s and daughter’s success instead of their pain.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
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I’m not extraordinary in any traditional sense. I don’t need to stand out. I’m often overwhelmed by attention. But I will tell you this. I will soar above those walls that you think protect you. I will believe in you as hard as I can and never let go of who I know you can be. I will be vulnerable enough to let the world break me, but strong enough to never wear the armor. I will stand over every line and make you believe you can do the same. It’s an unquietness I feel deep inside. It’s not about being extraordinary, you see. It’s not about standing out. It’s simply about shedding all that’s false. And believing with everything I have that you can too.
”
”
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
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You are your own savior, champion, and best friend, your own Knight in Shining Armor.
”
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Natasha Adamo (Win Your Breakup: How to Be The One That Got Away)
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As a society, let's all strive to make "old fashioned" the "new fashion". Husbands make it clear to your wives that you are on a mission to become her knight in shining armor.
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Lindsey Rietzsch (Successful Failures: Recognizing the Divine Role That Opposition Plays in Life's Quest for Success)
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He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare.
”
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Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS)
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Alas, for the man who never had any real desire or strive to accomplish anything in his past, at long last, he unexpectantly discovered his motivation. She was his happily ever after, and he intended to fight for her... even if he had to battle his way right into her stubborn heart. After a lifetime of searching, he finally realized that she was his purpose.
”
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Kristina Stangl (The Sleeping Knight (The Enchanted Forest Saga, #2))
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The armor of compliance and control is normally about fear and power. When we come from this place, we often engage in two armored behaviors: We reduce work to tasks and to-dos, then spend our time ensuring that people are doing exactly what we want, how we want it—and then constantly calling them out when they’re doing it wrong. The armor of compliance and control leads us to strip work of its nuance, context, and larger purpose, then push it down for task completion, all while using the fear of “getting caught” as motivation. Not only is this ineffective, it shuts down creative problem solving, the sharing of ideas, and the foundation of vulnerability. It also leaves people miserable, questioning their abilities, and even desperate to leave. The less people understand how their hard work adds value to bigger goals, the less engaged they are. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and frustration.
”
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Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
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My approach to training echoed how I climbed. The romance of climbing didn’t interest me. I didn’t seek harps and wings. I heard no opera up there. Instead, my mountains had teeth. The jagged edge we walked up there dragged itself across my throat, and the throats of my friends and peers. I took the mountains’ indifference to life as aggression, and fought back. I armored myself against that indifference; with training, with thinking, with attitude. I trained with friends who shared a similar approach. Our mantra was dark, but it motivated us. When we ran we breathed in rhythm—no matter the speed—and that beat had words: “They all died.” We inhaled and exhaled the great alpine epics—like the tragedy that befell Walter Bonatti’s party on the Freney Pillar—to push ourselves to a place where we would never come up short, physically. The consequences of falling short made training important. I realized early that controlling the things that I could control gave me greater freedom to address the things that I could not control. And the mountains offered those in spades.
”
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Steve House (Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete)
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It had become too powerful, its abbots competed with kings: in Abo did I not perhaps have the example of a monarch who, with monarch’s demeanor, tried to settle controversies between monarchs? The very knowledge that the abbeys had accumulated was now used as barter goods, cause for pride, motive for boasting and prestige; just as knights displayed armor and standards, our abbots displayed illuminated manuscripts. . . . And all the more so now (what madness!), when our monasteries had also lost the leadership in learning: cathedral schools, urban corporations, universities were copying books, perhaps more and better than we, and producing new ones, and this may have been the cause of many misfortunes.
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Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)
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It was not the money that was my main motive; it was the challenge and the thrill where I got my kicks. Armed robbery to me was like a sport. To take on an armored vehicle with two armed security guards—it was like an athlete attending the Olympic Games.
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Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
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I wonder sometimes if the price of my heightened resistance to loneliness might be higher than I realize. I’m in the phase of life when there are a lot of weddings, a lot of first babies, when, to many, the absence of those things appears troublesome, even pitiable. People like to say you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else, but that doesn’t seem true. I know plenty of people who hated being alone and whose happiness in finding a partner was magnified by relief. Their dislike, sometimes even horror, of being alone primed them for love, motivated them to commit. But if you’re actually happy alone, if you’ve accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone’s needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered. An acupuncturist, feeling my pulse, said he could tell I was an armored person. I asked my mom later if she thought I was armored, and she laughed like, duh. Would I be able to tell the difference between contentment and armor? It seems like one should be light and the other heavy, but you can get used to weight, not even notice it after a while.
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Natalie Eve Garrett (The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone)
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Be your own armor,
Be your motivator.
Your are the tide
of impossible light,
You are your carburetor.
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Abhijit Naskar (Sapionova: 200 Limericks for Students)
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He loved the undisturbing serenity of the night when half of the world would take a respite from the abrasive day while a motivated few hover over their blueprints for the future. For the birth or death of an idea often hinges on decisions made during the intellectual banquet tendered between midnight and dawn.
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Mariano Ngan (Cracks in the Armor)
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We live in a world full of duplicity.We are surrounded by people with duplicitous nature.They will be shooting arrows to question our honesty at every step we make.
Therefore,it is our duty to protect ourselves by using our integrity as an armor and march forward, victoriously.
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Indy Bissessur
“
If what you’re saying is bouncing off their psychological armor, it makes little difference how good you are at saying it. You are not being heard. Your people have to hear you to be moved by you.
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Steve Chandler (10 Ways to Motivate Others)
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When He Needs Freedom from Destructive Behavior Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. EPHESIANS 6:10-11 IT’S DIFFICULT FOR A WIFE to see her husband exhibit any kind of destructive behavior. In watching him doing something repeatedly that hurts his health or jeopardizes their family, she sees her future going over a cliff. There can be such terrible consequences for his behavior that it could ruin them financially, as well as destroy him physically or mentally. Whether it is drinking alcohol, taking drugs, gambling, smoking, reckless eating habits, or whatever else she observes her husband doing that could destroy him or endanger her or their children, it can be so heartbreaking to her that she cannot live with it. Every woman has to decide what she can and cannot tolerate. Life is hard enough without your husband finding ways to make it worse. And she must decide how much she can allow her children to witness before it seriously affects them too. You may not see behavior as seriously destructive as that in your husband, but perhaps he is taking unnecessary chances with his safety, such as driving too fast, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet, or being careless with dangerous machinery or equipment, or refusing to see a doctor when he should, or not following the doctor’s orders and thereby jeopardizing his health. There is only so much you can say or do to try to motivate your husband to stop destructive behavior if he is intent on doing it. But God can do miracles when you fervently pray to Him about it. He hears your prayers, and He wants your husband to be free as much as you do. Your prayers can help your husband open his eyes to see the truth. Your prayers can help him to understand how to put on the whole armor of God so he can stand against these plans of the enemy for his destruction. My Prayer to God LORD, I pray You would set my husband free from any destructive behavior he has acquired. Wake him up to the folly of his ways and show him when he is being foolish. Break the chains that bind him and open his blind eyes. Strengthen him where his weakness controls him. Enable him to see when the enemy has erected a stronghold in his life. Help him to understand how his behavior affects me and our children, as well as other family members, coworkers, and friends. Tell me what I can do to help make this situation better. I know I cannot change him, and I am unable to make anything happen. Only You can open his eyes, deliver him, and set him free from destructive behavior. I know foolish actions are not Your will for his life, and there is a big price to pay for everything that is not Your will. I pray that neither I nor my children will have to pay any price for his careless behavior. Whatever the reason he appears to have little regard for me, our children, or himself by continuing any reckless behavior, I pray You would deliver him from it completely. You are greater and more powerful than whatever draws him away from Your best. I trust You to set him free to be all You made him to be. In Jesus’ name I pray.
”
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Stormie Omartian (The Power of a Praying Wife Devotional)
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If the critics in general society only knew just how much women endure, tolerate, withstand, withhold, juggle, wish for, forgive, ignore, mask, understand and accept while wearing the heavy armor of strength, good nature, and courage, words such as weak, incapable and powerless would be stricken from any dialogue in which their qualities are being measured. lizfaublas.com
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Liz Faublas
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The part of me that would like to see guns abolished is motivated by the hope of a future in which mass murders are no longer a part of the American identity. So that we can all feel less afraid in the streets, in our churches and offices and schools. So that fewer people die. But there’s something else at work too. As a woman, I’ve spent most of my life learning that what strength or security I do have can be taken away at any second by a man. I think, on some level, I want to give this feeling to men. I want to take away what makes them feel powerful. I want to strip them of their security like they, for so long, have stripped women of ours. I want them to understand what it feels like to be vulnerable, to be powerless, to be afraid—to be left alone on this earth without armor.
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Melissa Faliveno (Tomboyland: Essays)
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Eric Garner was murdered by history. The motive was the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and determined to stay there. Now the long line of armor and weaponry arrayed against a single grieving woman appeared as symbols of our desire to separate. Hatred can be organized, but only individuals love. For a long moment Erica just stood in the middle of the street, staring at the preposterous show of force. The demonstrators were around the corner, still arguing. She was by herself.
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Matt Taibbi (I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street)
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HA,” Snowfall snorted. “I only have, like, seven non-magical weapons on me. We need THOUSANDS of weapons to drive these dragons away!” Lynx glanced down at her claws, as if she’d only just noticed that those were the only weapons she’d brought. “Really? Seven weapons?” “Yes, of course!” Snowfall said. She pointed to the spear on her back. “Spear.” Then to the knives in the sheaths at her wrists. “Knife, knife.” Then to the sheaths under her wings, the concealed pockets of her chain mail armor, and the pouch around her neck. “Knife, knife, throwing stars, poison.” She didn’t mention the other three hidden weapons, just in case Lynx was actually working for Crystal or the NightWings or had her own ulterior motives and was maybe planning to attack Snowfall as soon as she had her away from the castle unprotected. Well, ha ha, Snowfall had foiled her with those five guards! And the extra secret weaponry. And the totally being onto her!
”
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Tui T. Sutherland (The Dangerous Gift (Wings of Fire #14))
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a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.
”
”
Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
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When we embrace self-compassion, we embrace all the parts of who we are - the strengths and weaknesses, the joys and sorrows, the successes and failures. It's about shedding the armor of self-criticism and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, just as we are, imperfect yet deserving of love and kindness.
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Tara Ferrell (Healing Hearts: A Journey to Self-Compassion and Healing (The Success Blueprint))
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The strongest armor one can wear is integrity.
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Aloo Denish Obiero
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Avoiding being seen in these ways becomes our core motivation in life, each day a battle between the heavy armor we wear and the embarrassing characteristics that armor was designed to cover up.
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Devon Price (Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity)
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Ain't there nothing sapiens can't do,
Ain't no mountain sapiens can't climb.
Ain't no darkness sapiens can't conquer,
Ain't no division sapiens can't undivide.
”
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Abhijit Naskar (Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World)
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Each corpuscle contains the cosmos, each valve is gateway to valor.
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Abhijit Naskar (Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World)
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Each corpuscle contains the cosmos,
Each valve is gateway to valor.
Cada corpúsculo contiene el cosmos,
Cada válvula es la puerta al valor.
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Abhijit Naskar (Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World)
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The fear and problems live through us, the moment we consider them irrelevant & gather our armor to fight, they just die.
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Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
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We reduce work to tasks and todos, then spend our time ensuring that people are doing exactly what we want, how we want it - and then constantly calling them out when they're doing it wrong. The armor of compliance and control leads us to strip work of its nuance, context, and larger purpose, then push it down for task completion, all while using the fear of "getting caught" as motivation.
”
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Brené Brown (Dare to Lead)
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... mental-emotional defenses take many forms, including (1) categorizing and prejudging people, places, and ideas, so as to be protected from the new and unexpected (prejudice); (2) expecting nothing, so as to not be disappointed (hopelessness); (3) believing nothing, so as to not be responsible (cynicism); (4) communicating in sarcasm and cutting humor, so as not to be emotionally exposed and vulnerable (lightminded, guileful); (5) waiting on others to love us first, and even then inpugning the motive of one taking such initiative (doubting, fearing). On the other hand, a genuine testimony provides it's own armor, making such defenses unnecessary.
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Stephen R. Covey (The Divine Center)
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Many of us have hearts that are encrusted with anxieties, fears, aversions, sorrows, and an array of defensive armor. The non-reactive and accepting awareness of mindfulness will help to dissolve these crusts. The practice has a cyclic quality; it is self-reinforcing. At first, the practice will allow us to let go of a small amount of defensiveness. That release allows a corresponding amount of openness and tender- heartedness to show itself. This process encourages us to drop even more armor. Slowly, a greater sense of heartfeltness supports the further development of mindfulness.
As our neurotic thought patterns drop away, layers of judgment and resistance atrophy, and the need to define our selves through hard-held identities relaxes. As this happens, the natural goodness of the heart shines by itself.
The impulses to be aware, happy, compassionate, and free, all come from the goodness of our hearts. As we connect to these intentions and allow them to motivate our mindfulness practice, the practice becomes heartfelt.
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Gil Fronsdal (The Issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfulness Practice)
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The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
”
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Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)