Do all people torment themselves about what they have not done, or should do or cannot do?
First, we may have to eliminate people who are at a bare subsistence level. Or do they question themselves, too? I should have grabbed that cup of gruel from that old woman. She couldn’t have caught me. Then I would be eating. She’s probably going to be dead by tomorrow anyway.
Of course, I can think of people who to me appear to be grossly inadequate and yet I don’t hear them questioning themselves. I remember the guy who was in my Ventura Publisher class when I taught at Learning Tree University in Los Angeles. He did not know the software (a thousand dollar program back in the days when virtually nothing was more than $250). I had written two volumes on it that were licensed for use by the State of Illinois for a sum that would still be a lot of money today. He planned to charge $65 an hour for his work. I, the instructor, was billing $25 an hour, and happy to get it, because people still thought print shop desk clerks were graphic designers.
Yes, I have met people whose egos seem to keep them from questioning themselves.
Being a woman, I’m more in tune with how women suffer, and, believe me, we can do it in more ways than you could itemize in a week!
- We suffer when we think we aren’t good enough. And we suffer when we are so good that others feel bad they are not as good as we are.
- We suffer when we do too much and physically compromise ourselves. We suffer when we do more than those around us and are in psychic pain. We suffer when we do too little because we believe we should have done more.
- We suffer when we start something and wonder whether we should have begun it. Then we suffer when we have inklings we should abandon it. What about the people depending on me? What about sticking to what I started? And what will people think of me if I quit?
We also suffer when we’re working hard to accomplish something, pulling ourselves through a keyhole as it were, and people around us are saying Do what you love. Don’t try so hard. Believe and the Universe will support you.
Perhaps we suffer just a tad more when people around us are doing what they love, and prosperity attends them, and we cannot see when they paid their dues. Did they? Did they have a period of struggle while they honed their craft and found their niche? or did they just go out there and ask for it and believe and it fell in their laps? That really burns.
When I think about these people by name, the few I know, I tell myself they struggled at another time, when I wasn’t looking. They paid their dues. We all must, right?
Does that make you feel any better? because it doesn’t do much for me!
People are built differently. Some of us who grew up with the Calvinistic work ethic think we must earn every good thing that comes to us. Other people believe they do not have to earn anything. If they be, they be enough.
I wonder if we switched places, and Believers had to become doers and Doers had to believe and all would be well…I wonder whether each of us in our inimitable self-torment might find a way to suffer even more?
Win, lose or draw, we’re still alive. Whitney Houston is not.