To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
 
I am grappling with a disappointment. I have always had this irrational idea that if I speak too well about a particular person or thing or if I like a particular person or thing too much, then something will happen to take this particular person or thing away from me or something will happen to ruin my good relationship with said person or thing. I have a vague sense of fear of losing the person or thing the moment I discover an attachment for it.

I think there is a general belief in the Indian culture (perhaps in other cultures too?) to the effect that if you are too happy about something or rather show your happiness about something to people, then something bad will happen to spoil your happiness. The problem with having this irrational belief is that instead of interpreting a situation in a logical way one jumps to the conclusion that something really bad must have happened. To give a rather silly example, if I keep saying that I write good essays and then discover that I have a writer’s block, I don’t conclude that maybe I just need to postpone writing or maybe I need to think of other ideas but that because I have been harping about my good essays something bad has happened, and I cannot write them anymore!

Well, so my present disappointment is largely because I am interpreting a situation in this irrational way. I was so looking forward to a particular situation that now that this situation is unexpectedly not happening I am unable to digest the practical or logistical reasons and I am looking for cues or making them up to convince myself that something more dire has happened. It seems to me that I was looking forward to the situation so much that I almost made it not happen, if you know what I mean!

I guess sometimes we tend to internalise disappointments and dejections to convince ourselves perversely that they must be in some irrational way our own fault. The more we think these things are our own fault the more we try not to want things too much because in the very act of wanting them we seem to push them away…it’s almost like we don’t deserve anything good and the only way to have anything good is by not wanting it too much or not giving away the fact that we want it too much…lest the evil eye or whatever the superstitious term for it snatch the thing away from us… maybe it is not the superstitions playing a trick on us but our own insecurities that stop us from believing in our own worth and believing that those who rightly judge this worth will stick around no matter what… and those who don’t… isn’t the sooner they are snatched away, the better?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 8:36 pm 0 comments
HOME