Today's thinking is full of blame and it is jolly easy to buy into that. Complaining is so easy! You just have to find a few things that have gone wrong, you had the wrong parent, you went to the wrong school, you married the wrong person, the government are rubbish and altogether you have had bad luck all along. I can dig away and find a few nuggets to pull out and make dance before my inner eye if I want to be cast down and feel as if I have been swimming in a pool of bad luck! If I tell myself the stories of bad luck or tell them to others, there has to be a response and the desired response is sympathy, a shaking of the head and sharing of misery and the effect of that is not good, not good at all. What does it bring with it? If you feel sorry for yourself you find you have to make amends to help yourself feel better and what better way to do that than opening a bottle of wine, dipping your hand into a box of chocolates or buying yourself a new pair of shoes/a dress/a new house/a holiday. It can persuade you to change things, to change your husband, your car, your friendships because after all they don't really understand how simply awful your life is! Does this ring a bell for you? And more important do these changes produce the lasting relief you hoped for? Certainly there is mostly regret at the chocolate and alcohol soothing because you just put on extra pounds!
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| Monk on mobile phone! |
One of the things which can pull you out of this popular thinking and it takes a real effort to shift your thinking especially when so much of your apparent identity is riding on it, is to meet someone else who just doesn't carry that burden and to find that they are happy and free and don't need to escape from any past, real or imagined. I found that the monks at St Catherine's Monastery woke me up to the silliness of complaint and more to the joy and wonder to be found in simple things and it made looking around at what there is around a different experience. I think to myself what did I ever do to deserve the way daffodils grow, dogs love their masters, that there is sun and rain and spring brings great bursts of growth. What did I do to deserve good health, a family, a comfortable bed, the kindness of a good night's sleep, friends who don't fail me, to live in a peaceful country where there are laws to make things work for people. Did I do anything about building the Churches, the Cathedrals, the temples, the Monasteries, the hospitals or the schools? Of course not, so perhaps instead of complaining about anything I don't like about them or about the people who have built and maintained and taught and nursed and healed in them, I should be thinking about how to help them.
These monks who live in Sinai, they don't appear to complain, they just keep the gateway to heaven open by saying prayers, lighting lamps, intoning the psalms and not many chocolates I don't think. Anyway I didn't see any chocolate wrappers sticking out of their habits! And being there in the monastery guesthouse made me appreciate the simple clean air, the blue blue sky, the almond blossom and also how unusual it is to see those things when most of the time, I am immersed in a world constructed by me. If you want to read more about the monks of St Catherine, click on the picture of these two.
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| Almond blossom in the garden of the Monastery |
Today's thinking is full of blame and it is jolly easy to buy into that. Complaining is so easy! You just have to find a few things that have gone wrong, you had the wrong parent, you went to the wrong school, you married the wrong person, the government are rubbish and altogether you have had bad luck all along. I can dig away and find a few nuggets to pull out and make dance before my inner eye if I want to be cast down and feel as if I have been swimming in a pool of bad luck! If I tell myself the stories of bad luck or tell them to others, there has to be a response and the desired response is sympathy, a shaking of the head and sharing of misery and the effect of that is not good, not good at all. What does it bring with it? If you feel sorry for yourself you find you have to make amends to help yourself feel better and what better way to do that than opening a bottle of wine, dipping your hand into a box of chocolates or buying yourself a new pair of shoes/a dress/a new house/a holiday. It can persuade you to change things, to change your husband, your car, your friendships because after all they don't really understand how simply awful your life is! Does this ring a bell for you? And more important do these changes produce the lasting relief you hoped for? Certainly there is mostly regret at the chocolate and alcohol soothing because you just put on extra pounds!
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