Blogs really are about yourself. I spend so much time here thinking about myself. Truly, I do. I have not stopped to analyze it until today, when I noticed that Laetitia was exhausted, perhaps from the heat, perhaps from the mania of 4 kids, or perhaps from the onset of panic about moving to a foreign country for an entire year. It was when I noticed her fatigue that I stopped to think, 'wow, I totally feel like that all the time lately!' And, then one thought led to another (per the usual with me) and I suddenly realized how much time I spend thinking about myself. Just in this paragraph alone, I have used the word "I" ten times, not including the "I" in the quotation marks.
It's the curse of selfishness from which all of mankind suffers. Think about it: it's 2:30pm and you are feeling the beginnings of a nap settling upon you after eating too many carbs at lunch (and, according to my health nazi book, eating the carbs before the meat, a mistake that will only result in unusual and sudden fatigue). You want to sleep but you are at work on the clock. What do you do? For the next 3 hours, until the clock strikes 5:30pm on-the-dot, you mentally complain to yourself about how much you want to sleep, how unfair it is that the business world never sleeps, and how much you need a vacation, but you can't afford to take a vacation because the selfish system of capitalism only requires that employers award a few days of vacation after a ridiculously long tenure, and you are thus unproductive for the rest of the afternoon.
If I spent half as much time thinking about other people as I did myself, I have not even one inkling's worth of ability to imagine how much more productive I could be. At the risk of sounding a bit pyscho-analytical, the world of creativity lives and thrives inside our minds alone, and I can only begin to fathom how much more effective and useful our hands and feet would be if we would just program them to be creative instead of selfish. We were made to serve. Everything about us was made for someone else, yet we always tend to shelter ourselves from our own potential, forgetting that we were made for and by brilliance.
Imagine with me: instead of outright scolding a child with common words and the usual spanking, creating a reprimand so brilliant and unusual that the child never dares to repeat it again? Instead of honking the horn at the old woman who seems like she will never make it to the other side of the street before Armageddon, wishing the stranger in the car next to you (he is probably late for a meeting too) a good day, or even just a smile. By the time you look up, grandma will have landed, hopefully safe and sound.
Twisting our mindset from negative to positive is an ever-constant battle, but an ever-necessary challenge. We are always on display, for better or for worse. I'm working on becoming a trophy case, not a dusty bookcase.
It's the curse of selfishness from which all of mankind suffers. Think about it: it's 2:30pm and you are feeling the beginnings of a nap settling upon you after eating too many carbs at lunch (and, according to my health nazi book, eating the carbs before the meat, a mistake that will only result in unusual and sudden fatigue). You want to sleep but you are at work on the clock. What do you do? For the next 3 hours, until the clock strikes 5:30pm on-the-dot, you mentally complain to yourself about how much you want to sleep, how unfair it is that the business world never sleeps, and how much you need a vacation, but you can't afford to take a vacation because the selfish system of capitalism only requires that employers award a few days of vacation after a ridiculously long tenure, and you are thus unproductive for the rest of the afternoon.
If I spent half as much time thinking about other people as I did myself, I have not even one inkling's worth of ability to imagine how much more productive I could be. At the risk of sounding a bit pyscho-analytical, the world of creativity lives and thrives inside our minds alone, and I can only begin to fathom how much more effective and useful our hands and feet would be if we would just program them to be creative instead of selfish. We were made to serve. Everything about us was made for someone else, yet we always tend to shelter ourselves from our own potential, forgetting that we were made for and by brilliance.
Imagine with me: instead of outright scolding a child with common words and the usual spanking, creating a reprimand so brilliant and unusual that the child never dares to repeat it again? Instead of honking the horn at the old woman who seems like she will never make it to the other side of the street before Armageddon, wishing the stranger in the car next to you (he is probably late for a meeting too) a good day, or even just a smile. By the time you look up, grandma will have landed, hopefully safe and sound.
Twisting our mindset from negative to positive is an ever-constant battle, but an ever-necessary challenge. We are always on display, for better or for worse. I'm working on becoming a trophy case, not a dusty bookcase.
1 comment:
Now that's a revelation that most people never have! God is working! You are amazing! I Love You, Mom
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