Nurture Resentments
Why rent space in your head to those that don’t love you, to thoughts that don’t serve you? One of my favorite affirmations is “Forgiveness offers me all that I want; Release brings peace.” Not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Compare yourself to others
Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses, they are broke. I always like the story about the kid who admires a neighbor’s new pool and says “Dad! They must have money!” Dad replies “No, son. They used to have money, now they have a pool.” As the awesome poem Desiderata says: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” The only person you should try to be better than is yourself of yesterday.
Isolate Yourself
Go ahead, stay behind those fortress walls! You are an island, and an island feels no pain and an island never cries (apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, full lyrics below). WRONG! Hiding the real you never works, souls uncloaked must be to taste whole joys (John Donne, taken slightly out of context). Study after study has shown folks with strong social networks are healthier and live longer. Or as Barbara Streisand sang, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
Closing Quotes:
“How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others… But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.” – M. Scott Peck 1936-2005, The Road Less Traveled
“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.” – Catherine Ponder, b. 1927
People
“We’re children, needing other children
And yet letting a grown-up pride
Hide all the need inside A
cting more like children than children”
– Barbara Streisand, 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl
I am a Rock
A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow
I am a rock
I am an island
I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain
I am a rock
I am an island
Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried
I am a rock
I am an island
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me [Refrain]
I am a rock
I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries.
– Simon and Garfunkel
As always, I share what I most want/need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier
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