This is what I have been trying to learn on my 37th year here.
As I walk around building perceptions about myself and allowing others to feed me more of them for all these years,
I begin to wonder if I am collecting too much .
Too much pride
Too much confidence
Too much self righteousness
Too many achievements
And too much money that comes with it most of the times
Too much love even, perhaps
There is no problem with too much of all these things but the trouble is when I unknowingly start gathering a lot of self esteem. Sounds bizarre right? Is there anything as too much self esteem. Ridiculous.
I am working rigorously to create tools that build self esteem in children for heaven’s sake! So why am I talking about re-tracking all of this?
What am I really saying?
Let me try again.
With too much pride comes the guarding of few not-so great revelations about me
With too much confidence comes the severe myopia of my limitations
With too much self righteousness comes the intolerance for others mistakes
With too many achievements come the fixation to move to the next level without enjoying the perfection of the current score
With too much money comes the strong nostalgia for roadside tea with rain drops in them
With too much love comes the built in taking-for-granted feature
I tell myself, it is good you know these things so you will appreciate everything and everybody in your life and live a blessed life. All’s good!
But this is where the catch is, this kind of awareness is often fleeting and you are back to your grand opinion of self before you realize.
The self. An interesting concept and ‘being’ in itself; I will write more about it another time. For now, on the idea of ‘too much’ in life I am trying to begin by abandoning each of those fabulous things I have crafted for myself.
And you know what, while I focus on the great things about me that I am trying to get away from I realize, I just as quickly build new perspectives. Oh!
Hmmm it still works. Let me show you how;
While I attempt this ridiculous list,
One, I get acutely aware of how blessed I am (reinforcement on the sly)
Two, I also get to throw away all the not-so-nice things about me (cleaning the corners without being harsh on me)
Three, I realize in those brief moment of throwing and before making a new perception – that I do exist even without these perceptions.
(which means whether I have these blessing or not!)
This new perspective that lives on with me for a while, a long, long while even though I may now have defined myself anew.
Too much awareness of anything is awareness of a partial kind anyway. Simply put, we are anyway only going to see things from our point of view at any given time. But this just lets me take my chair and move a little towards the right and say ‘how wonderful the sun looks while setting’
Much like what I said about the sun when the chair was a little to the left even. But it was worth knowing I have hands that can carry a chair and a spine that lets my body bend and straighten up, that my eyes can see and that I AM even if the chair or the sun were not to be there.
Therefore I Am Here even if my pride, success, achievements, money and love were not to be there in my life. See the connection? Nice eh?
Tomorrow I will try to let go of this too and find another thing or two about me.
Between the mysterious self, the mind that things faster than me, a heart that feels more that I can ever know, there is so much to look forward to in life.
