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
Sunday, November 17, 2019
 
I sometimes wonder if I think too much of myself especially since I appreciate humility as a virtue. I swing like a pendulum from thinking no end of myself to thinking very little, and in between I ask myself why I have to be one extreme or the other. I could very well be so-so or the cringe worthy ‘average’. Why should I be excellent or nothing? The trouble with thinking in such extremes is that you take every situation and every person as some sort of a test for where you stand. If you perform excellently one day and get a pat on the back, you swing one way, and if someone seems to look past you on the street (maybe they didn’t even notice you), you might swing the other. Your control or hold on your own sense of self is very precarious because it is not located within your own self but rather on the outside in the perceived validations and negations.  

While I often speak about my favourite virtues, the one vice I have and have had since childhood is jealousy. I think that no vice is so bad if one has awareness of it and in that sense perhaps there is no vice as bad as a lack of self-awareness because if you are not self-aware chances are you don’t even recognise your own vices and therefore cannot reflect about them, much less correct them or at least control them. It seems to me that my propensity for jealousy might be related to a desire for validation from the external world and a feeling that if this validation doesn’t come from those whose validation is highly esteemed then it means you swing the other way, you are not good enough, or even worse, you are ‘average’. This vice can be destructive if one focuses on comparison and competition with those who do get the validation because then instead of working toward becoming more worthy of validation one focuses on becoming better than another person(s) which I would assume is detrimental to achieving the objective of self-improvement which requires a positive focus… whereas this same vice through self-awareness could also be positively transformative if instead of focusing on comparison and competition, one works toward self-improvement and becoming worthy of the validation of one who is highly esteemed. But what would be even better is if one detaches oneself from desire for validation from an external entity and focuses on desire for self-improvement for its own sake (and not for the sake of external validation). Instead of viewing people as competition and contesting for the same validation one could view them all as on their own journey which could be more or less successful than yours but which nevertheless does not have a bearing on your own unique journey of self-making or self-improvement or self-fulfilment or whatever that might be (I realise that I am increasingly using academic jargon on my blog—is that a good thing or bad, dear readers?).

I guess what I’m saying is that the only validation worth seeking comes from within and not from outside albeit if one is self-aware and reflective…and if others receive it more than you do even from ones whom you esteem, it should not cause any jealousy or negative emotion because you are secure in your own validation. Your sense of self is not precariously perched on the fragile branch of arbitrary evaluation and whimsical appreciation.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 7:15 pm 0 comments
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