integrity = wholeness

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” — Abraham Maslow

Today, in the United States of America, we call this the end of a year. In my framework of existence, this is quite arbitrary so I am not going to make a big proclamation about resolutions and how I want, need or expect life to be in the “year ahead”. Instead, I am reflecting on how every moment of the NOW offers us a choice point. It feels to me that every moment is a bifurcation. Sometimes, I feel like I am exploring more than one possibility even within the same moment by playing out one reality in the physical realm and one in the realm of imagination. I am becoming more and more aware of how important it is to sculpt my reality from a place of fusion or one-centered attention. On this day before the “new year”, I ran across both the quote by Maslow above and this from the Oracle of Delphi. They both spoke to the questions living in my heart.

“There are two roads, most distant from each other: the one leading to the honorable house of freedom, the other the house of slavery, which mortals must shun. It is possible to travel the one through manliness and lovely accord; so lead your people to this path. The other they reach through hateful strife and cowardly destruction; so shun it most of all.’

I am evermore mindful of choice and of sculpting the “honorable house of freedom” by choosing growth and overcoming fear. Living at cross-purposes has only created a fragmented me. It has taken me a long time to reach a point of such clarity and integrity. Integrity is defined as incorruptible and complete. That is certainly my highest intention! I see that the etymology of both integrity and integrate is the Latin word integer meaning whole.

To choose integrity means to be whole.

There can be no better reality to be sculpting than one of wholeness.

And so it is.