I have been thinking about what I would say is the most important thing that I have learnt in all of my life. And today I think this is it: in this and every single moment of our lives with no exceptions we are your own heroes.

Does that sound like a self-centred, narcissistic, egotistical, implausible statement? Why? Why does it seem to be that?

Being grateful doesn’t mean that any human needs to suspend the ability to see themselves as the most skillful valuable asset to themselves, as a person who is meant to both profit and serve best in community.

Some of you might wonder why this is a groundbreaking thought for me.

It seems to me that many, if not all of us have been socialized to think of ourselves as heroes and missionary saviours to others. We fail to see all peoples’ worth and value through any other lenses but our own. And in that system we do not see all people, including and especially ourselves, as the heroes of their own lives. We have been taught that the heroes are those who save us.

The central idea to that belief is that we do not know best how to save ourselves, and we are taught to believe that we are inept if we delete, defer, or delegate tasks in order to empower us to be our best. We are only successful when we do everything ourselves, especially if the thing that we do allows us to hoard stores of money.

Therefore, we see those who seek assistance, especially monetary assistance, as unwise and unskilled.

That’s not our fault. It is a common human experience.

It is the impact of being raised in intrinsically narcissistic religious and political systems that position themselves as the definition of good and as keepers of the key to connection with God.

It is the impact of being raised in systems which teach us to define our worth by seeing how closely we can be a reflection of those systems.

They teach us to claim the systemic ways as our ways and to assert these ways of being as the best and wisest.

I come to this understanding as I reflect on how our family has endured through factors that even we still don’t comprehend, while being of service to everyone possible without optimal financial and relational gain.

Therefore I am working currently on learning how to position my children to learn that they are never again to allow themselves to be used without profit.

I hope to teach them to never again be caught in the exploitative web of religious and/or political communities.

The best missionaries, I now understand, have learned to deeply value all, and have learned to allow the beings whom they seek to help, to lead, and to value that leadership. They learn how to be partners instead of assuming that they are teachers.

Such relationships are not fraught with anxiety. There is great peace and profit in knowing that things do not have to be as we typically experience or as we expect them to be in order to be good.

When we get to this place we truly experience peace as we recognize that we are a world full of nothing but heroes, who function best as ourselves in community with each other.

And we learn to see all of us as missionaries, people on a mission, including and not limited to our roles in the lives of those closest to us, so as parents, teachers, partners, and friends etc.

When we accept this definition of being we will finally function as equals. And there we will finally be at peace.