A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that one of the aspects of my “plan” is working to find a positive answer to Einstein’s reputed question: “Is the universe friendly?”

Albert Einstein once said the most important question a human being can ask is “Is the universe friendly?” Think of that for a moment. How would you answer? If you think the universe is truly friendly and supportive of you, this obviously has a huge effect on your perceptions and behaviour. The same applies if you think cosmos is hostile - or just indifferent to your fate.

I thought of this again for two reasons. One, both Debra and Grace have been blogging on real soul-searching aspects of compulsive overeating.

The other reason this came up is that I’ve been reading Chris Lawford’s Symptoms of Withdrawal (a much easier read than Oprah’s A Million Little Pieces). Over the weekend, I came across this quote from Lawford’s grandmother Rose Kennedy:

I find it interesting to reflect on what has made my life, even with its moments of pain, an essentially happy one. I have come to the conclusion that the most important element in human life is faith.

I am really intrigued by how this concept of faith is related to Einstein’s question and my current sense of well-being. For I made a similar discovery to Grace: for her, it was redefining God as love.

For me, it was in working myself out of the dark, scary place I had been, and deciding that the universe might not be the hostile place it had felt like in recent years. One thing that was particularly helpful was seeing Wayne Dyer’s Power of Intention (the book is fine, but for me, seeing it on PBS was much more helpful) and having it click.

In my current world view, faith is not about believing in a specific God (indeed, stuff like this or this can have one really questioning whether non-atheists are really kidding ourselves). Like Grace, I don’t believe in the God of my Catholic upbringing. Instead, I’m currently a fan of the 747/tornado/junkyard concept (see #3) that there’s more to all this than evolution.

So for me, part of the journey this year has been rediscovering my faith in a positive universe and in the idea that it’s worth the effort to live my life rather than escape from it.

Interestingly, this also ties back into some relevant concepts from a book that I’ve had on my shelf since very early in my overeating days: M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled:

Life is difficult. …

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. …

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. … It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.

Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain. … In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, ‘Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.’

But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid. …

I have stated that discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. … What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. … The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them … which is love.

That last little bit is it in a nutshell: The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them … which is love.

I’ve never made it past the first half of the book, though the early pages are all quite dog-eared and marked up with passages that I’ve thought relevant at one time or another. The book was discouraging to me in many ways because Peck states fairly plainly that if one doesn’t develop these tools as a child, the process of doing so later in life is not an easy task.

Now I can look back and wish that I had really not gotten hung up so much on the hardship of dealing with my lack of discipline (delaying gratification being perhaps my Mt. Everest) and spent the time instead on finding and feeling love. I’ll have to reread TRLT to find out what Peck meant, but I know for me that finding and feeling love wasn’t about finding a partner to meet my needs. Instead, it has been about being able to feel loved even without an über-mommy or Prince Charming in my life.

I liked the way Ann Richards put it:

You are the one person you can count on living with for the rest of your life.

She wrote this in the context of learning to enjoy your own company, but for me, it was more about giving up the fantasy that someone was going to come and take care of me. More importantly, it has been about developing a deep faith in my journey going forward.