Priorities For Life

In the end only one matters

Joe Merkle
3 min readFeb 2, 2024
Image by https://www.freepik.com/author/wayhomestudio

The average adult human being lives his/her life with a certain set of priorities. Now, most of these have been inherited, set in stone, and handed down for generations. Go to school, get a job, work hard, fall in love, have a family, and believe in God. You get the point. Look around at your family and friends. I am guessing at least 80% of the people you know fall into this category. This is what I would define as the pursuit of complacency. In seeking what is normal and comfortable one abandons the deeper levels of consciousness that reveal our true selves.

The driving factor that motivates nearly all of us is love. Love that is generally felt at an emotional level. Love that comes with attachments. Love that makes demands. What I will refer to as human love. Let me expound on this human love.

Let us start with self-love. In the most basic of terms, this could be egotism, vanity, arrogance, etc… At the highest levels, it could be caring, selflessness, and sacrifice for the greater good above selfish intentions.

As humans, we fall into these cycles that resemble a workout on a treadmill. We work hard to get eventually nowhere in a spiritual sense. Now there is some growth in awareness. The sense that there is more to life beyond our comprehension. Many confuse this with faith…

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Joe Merkle

I write about love, life, loss, kindness, and gratitude. Toss in some fiction and humor and you have the meanderings of a multifarious writer.