yes, augustine is awesome.  i am afraid that i will have to regress to high school self in order to relearn high school forte of latin to read original.  latin is in some way a language that has shaped my sensibility more than any other.  more personal.  as a poet once put it, the grand fiction which we live is "to compound the imagination's latin with the lingua franca et jocundissima."  everyone has to think and feel in latin or the ur- of latin and then translate into english, and if you take latin you understand that this is true of you.  most people are incapable of actually saying anything (though they can learn, or be trained, to make rhetorical ejaculations) because they do not know their own native tongue, which is latin.  english is clattery and brittle.  all the strong words in english are small and fused together by large swaths of nothing much, and it can be said that there is no such thing as a native english speaker because in english there is not the density needed for the infant psyche to be integral to itself on the basis of its grammar.  lacan would have said this if he had not been born french.  french is like a cold air current and as someone once said 'omnipotent.'  but latin is elemental and sensuously muscular.  not as powerful as french but in some way more physical, more perfected. 

"....Augustine is providing a dramatic account of moral transformation, one that stresses the role of intellectual discernment while at the same time highlighting his conviction that no amount of discernment is sufficient to account for what we might refer to, for want of a better phrase, as the phenomenology of internal moral conflict. In terms of this agonistic inner turmoil, the will as both present and emergent is on an equal footing with our powers of rational discernment."

From now on I will, shall, call all my problems phenomena of internal moral conflict and leave it at that. 

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/)

i have had to give up a lot of advantages by wasting them, wasting time and life, just to come to the understanding that advantage doesn't matter.  how you leverage what you start with is meaningless.  everyone has to uncover in them what is worthwhile.  it has nothing to do with games people play to maximize their effect on this world or on themselves.  these are prostheses that only put you at a distance from what matters.  i do not mean to complain, but it is bad.  the only good is that which you come simply to sense.  it does not need to be multipled, divided, extended, invested, or anything else.  when you grow up thinking you are super lucky, whether because of natural gifts or the kind of social position you were born with, it is deceptive because in the end no one is born with so much that they never have to try, or can avoid the suffering which comes with all kinds of failure.  even really powerful, amazing people of the sort that everyone calls 'amazing people' are in fact mere mortals.  one human being truly doing all they can is pretty amazing, it's true.  everyone has a heap of potential.  but it's very rare to get things lined up so that everything actually gets done.  sometimes even the notion that you are 'being productive' is distracting from the fact that all you do everyday calls on only a small range of all that you could be doing.  it's just like the ergonomic stress caused by repetitive use of really small muscles or joints.  people have it in them to do great and varied things, but instead they stress the same operation over and over.  a really amazing person, though, works through their whole range of possibility on a regular basis.  often they do not even know how perfect they are.  they don't know that what they're doing, which seem like the modest efforts of one small person, in fact represent the apical expression of human potential - a whole person, acting from the entirety of their substance.  they probably feel as if they have very little to show for the fact that they're calling on absolutely all their powers to get through each day of life.  but in fact, one who can actually give everything to their days is certainly going to be noticed as having/being in some ultimate sense enough.    

it is dangerous to see yourself as having too much when the essence of life in this world probably has much more to do with limitation, not only that brought by death but all the varieties of fragility.  very seldom is anything good enough, and even when things are too good they may not be good enough.  ampleness is the rarest quality.  people brought up to think only that they have been super-lucky, winning the lottery before birth as it were, are being blackmailed to work harder than anybody deserves to be worked, and toward goals which are not really valid human objectives.  it is not fair to demand anything from anybody save for sincerity really. 

 furthermore, there is not really any justice to be done in life save for the kind which comes from an understanding that you can't please everyone; and probably, in all truth, can only be just once in your entire life, if you are to be wholly just.  so people should just follow their intuition and not be so ashamed of ignorance or unsureness.  often what people ought to do is not to be frazzling themselves with 'what should i do, what should i do' blahdeeblah all the time, but just wondering.  this too can be enough.  the strong choices one must make by and by still have to be made with some sense of economy.  it is just like giving orders to another person.  when you make a big choice you give orders to yourself.  can't give too many or you change mere faithful obedience into a kind of slavery.  people have to be like good kings to themselves.  and then, too, they have to realize that both the subject and the sovereign can only do what they do. 

that is a lot.  when i was a kid i felt that optimality is important.  you should only do what you are good at or is easy.  then chill, play games, act a fool.  now i feel that this was very wrong.  it is necessary to choose to do what you must do, regardless of whether you'd be good or bad at it.  it has much more to do with character than mechanical sorts of talent.  if you always worry about specializing in what you're good at then you will miss the one thing in life which must not be missed.  the rest is dross.  you can worry about the rest later on, and there is pretty much always a little time to deal with the minutiae of career positioning and so forth but there is almost never time enough, in fact, time is the arch enemy of the main point you can't afford to miss.