I Am the Decisive Element

As I set goals for 2014, I recall these two quotes that North Stars for our Outward Bound trek a couple years ago.

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Why don't you stay in the wilderness?  Because that isn't where its at; it's back in the city, back in downtown St. Louis, back in Los Angeles.  The final test is whether your experience of the sacred in nature enables you to cope more efficiently with the problems of man.  if it does not enable you to cope more effectively with the problems - and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it just sucks you right out into the wilderness and you stay there the rest of your life - then when that happens, by my scale of value, it's failed.  You go to nature for an experience of the sacred... to re-establish your contact with the core of things, where it's really at, in order to enable you to come back into the world of man and operate more effectively.  Seek ye first the kingdom of nature, that the kingdom of man might be realized.

Willi Unsoeld