No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.*
(Carl Jung)

What if it was the case that the world revealed whatever goodness it contains in precise proportion to your desire for the best?**
(Jordan Peterson)

We want the easy life, to be special in some way, for life to work for us, to be in control, and perhaps, even, to live forever.

None of these seem particularly harmful and yet history shows us that none of us are free from dealing great harm when are free to roam wherever they will.

We need to be tethered and the tether is a five corded hawser, a means of focusing more powerfully our hopes and wants:

Life is hard;
We are not as special as we think;
Our lives are not about us;
We are not in control;
We are going to die.

The tension created between what we want and how life is where we find ourselves most alive and useful and caring, where our greatest joys and the world’s deepest needs meet.

Slackness, the separation of one from the other, is what we have to avoid.

(*Carl Jung, quoted in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.)
(**From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.)