I’m learning – slowly and over great time – that the best way to argue is to not. The best argument is to live your life well and meaningfully. Napoleon Hill wrote that every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. This is so true, at least for me. There is not a bad thing that has ever happened to me that did not yield some good, some wisdom, some strength.  Hill spent his life studying the reasons some people succeed and others fail. He found the most common denominator in a successful life was a determination to grow and change, a mindset to live fully and successfully.

I’ve always known on some level that the hero journey is not about dealing with happiness and success but about dealing with heartache and failure, fear and anger. It is not a perfect life I seek, but a life well and thoughtfully, especially when there is trouble. I believe that fear and anger are poisons, they corrode the sender and the receiver, they destroy lives and gobble up souls and spirits. I work continuously to remove them and the people who transmit them from my life.

I live an open life, a life I share on the Internet, the great leveler of boundaries and borders. Through the door comes all kind of stuff, good and bad and can spend your life in explanation and argument, or simply give thanks for your life and live it.  It is so easy to hit those send buttons, so easy to obliterate the boundaries that are the stuff of healthy human interaction. One of the best lessons I ever got was in my hospice work, when my teachers told me there is only one thing to say to someone in pain or distress: I’m sorry, can I help you? I wish you well. Nothing else is appropriate. This advice changed my life because it forced me to see people and  meet people where they really are, not where I wished them to be or thought them to be.

There is little more humbling than to hold the hand of a person leaving the world Again and again, I am reminded that I know nothing, have no answers, cannot tell other people what to do, how to feel.

I appreciate sharing my heartaches and failures, success and adversities, it has helped me to grow and change. For all of it, I love my blog. Interactivity is my politics, I have been practicing it every day of my writing life. I am in a great dialogue with the people who read and follow my work, a miraculous thing for all of its warts and challenges. When you open that door, you have little control over what comes in, and that, too, is the challenge and drama of the open life. There is a lot of good stuff, a lot of bad. Some time ago, I decided that my life cannot be an argument for other people to make, that my decisions are mine, and not subject to advice, praise, condemnation or the opinions of others. It’s a good rule, and I have been affirmed in that again and again.

The best way to argue, I have come to see, is to live my life. To find love. To take photographs that touch souls. To write things that reach people, get them to think, reflect the struggles of their own lives. To treat my animals lovingly and well and work to know and understand them. I love Napoleon Hill’s seminal observation. This is the meaningful life – awakening to the idea that ever fear, every anger, every failure and heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

The best argument is one’s life, is my life.