A momentous occurrence in my life

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Website owner:  James Miller

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Sometime in the period between 1974 and 1977 a very momentous thing

happened to me. Probably the most important event of my entire life. And

I never documented it. I don't even know exactly when it happened. Yet

when it happened I knew immediately it's significance and knew that I

should document it immediately. But I didn't know just how to set it down

into words at the time and perhaps was lazy, too, and wasn't feeling

inclined to the mental effort required and postponed it. And I kept

postponing it until exactly what had happened slipped from my mind. And I

have been angry at myself ever since for letting that happen. For as many

things as I have documented, and all the writing I have done, here I let

what was probably the most important incident of my life go undocumented.

What event was this that I am talking about? For years I had been

struggling in a trap, a snare, a maze, of deep emotional and mental

problems and had been looking for the door out. I had looked and looked

for it and was at my wits end. I despaired of ever finding it. This

important event was that I found it --- and then walked out. You can

imagine how happy I was. When I found the door I knew I had found it.

When I walked out I was sure I was free. I had been struggling with

these mental problems since my early teenage years, since my high school

days, struggled with them for perhaps twenty five years. Now I had

finally found the door out. Yet it also must be said that it seemed just

too good to be true at the time, after all the years of struggling and

search, and there was in my mind the thought that I should wait a little

while before saying too much about it, just to be sure. It was hard to

believe that all my problems could evaporate just like that, as

entrenched as they were, and as long as I had had them. But time proved

that that initial certainty within me that they were gone forever was

right and that I was indeed free. I have never had a trace of them

since. How amazing!

Now I try to give some approximation to what happened, as far as my fuzzy

memory allows me. What happened was a sort of mental "flip" or switch in

attitude in relation to something. It was something as elusive and

subtle as attitudes are elusive and subtle. It was a conscious decision

to do something, that came out of some thinking I had been doing. A

conscious decision to change my attitude about something. And as soon as

I had made that decision I knew within myself that I had just stepped

through that door that I had been looking for years. I had finally found

it. I was now out in the open sunlight and free. I knew that everything

was going to be OK for me, that my problems were over. I think it was an

action that I had resisted making previously; I hadn't been

psychologically ready to make it, but now I felt ready to make it and I

wanted to make it. And once I got to that point I knew that this was

that key I had been looking for for so long. So what was the attitude

change? It was a decision, first, to be happy with the accomplishments I

had made in life to date, to stop pushing for higher goals, to be content

and satisfied with myself just as I was at that moment, to take a future

policy of just relaxing and enjoying life as it comes; and secondly, and

most importantly, to change my attitude toward people, to stop being

defensive and hostile toward them, to open up to them, to stop being

antisocial in my feelings and attitudes. And it was this fundamental

change in attitude toward people that seemed to be the key. Immediately

a great weight was lifted from my shoulders. I knew it was a momentous

event for me, a watershed event. It was a basic change in direction for

me. And immediately I enthusiastically started thinking about all the

things I was going to do to implement the decision. I started thinking

how I was going to start locating and rooting out all my feelings of

anger and hostility toward people (whether justified or not) and to

pursue the goal of being a warm, friendly person. My decision was to

stop being antisocial, to stop holding people off at a distance, and to

like them. To like them, indeed, in spite of all reasons one might

produce for disliking them; to like them irregardless of themselves.

Thus I was suddenly propelled by a wish to be a warm, friendly person.

And immediately the old spirit of anger, hostility and antisociability

was gone and I had within me a new spirit of warmth, friendliness and

liking for people. And from then on all my problems just started melting

away.

It is important to note that this decision had behind it the force of a

certain realization: the realization was that anger, hatred and hostility

are inherently delf-destructive in the end, that they hurt you more than

they hurt anyone else. Thus the decision was strengthened by the fact

that I knew it was in my own best interest to like people and to get rid

of my hostility and anger. But one can know that something is in his own

best interest and still stubbornly, defiantly refuse to do it. But I had

come to the point where I felt I wanted to do it. And that wanting to was

the key. And it wasn't until I had suddenly wanted to and done it that I

realized how very important the key was I had just unwittingly turned.

Jan 1987