You have to realization that not everything that happens in life is all about you. Thinks may work out well, but you may not have been the primary reason for their success. Things may fail, but the failure may not have been your fault. You have to realize that you are not God and its is not your responsible to run the world. Some of the things that will happen to me in the year ahead will be the result of things I do and choices I make. I deserve the credit and the blame for perhaps half of the things that happens to me. If I eat and drink too much and never exercise...i have only self to blame for any health problems. Many of things that will shape my fate in the new year will be out of my hands, the result of biology, luck and other people's choices.
Why is it so hard for us to accept the idea that it's not all about us, that we may not be responsible for all the good and bad moments in our lives. As newborn..we seem to believe that the world seem to exist for no purpose other than to meet our needs. In the normal course of life...most children will reluctantly learn to leave that notion behind...but some people never learn the lesson, and most of us never learn it entirely. Bits of that infantile outlook remain hidden in our souls and emerge from time to time.
The childish fantasy of grandiosity, being the center of everything that happens, manifests itself in our tendency to feel guilty, to feel personally responsible every time something we were involved in doesn't work out as we hoped. We are so guilty-prone, unable to accept the fact that there are may be alot o reasons for something not working out, because at some perverse level, it feels good to feel bad. To be culpable is to be powerful. to be the one on whom everyone and everything depends upon.
To expect the world to treat you fairly because you are an honest person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian. When something bad happens to us, we feel singled out by fate. We are convinced that everyone else out there is happy and healthy and only we are suffering. I have know people who took pleasure in being sick or suffering bereavement because it brought them the sympathy and attention they craved. In a perverse way, it validate their need to feel special, and in their mind elevated them above all those other people who lives were lacking in drama.
If you want something and didn't get it, clearance is given you to feel sorry for yourself...when you're feeling sorry for yourself, you are not going to help others or show them kindness because you have grievance against the world....but the response to humility would lead one not to think. ..my misfortune makes me more pitiable than anyone else on earth, but, my misfortune give me a sense of kinship with other suffering souls out there. Not everything that happens is about us or because of us, then personal sorrow need not and should not, teach us to feel sorry for ourselves. It can and should teach us to feel solidarity with others. What connects us to others and the world is what breaks our hearts.
We can respond to the personal experience of heartbreak as we will almost surely encounter it, in one of two ways. We can let our pain monopolize our thoughts to the exclusion of other people and their problems. Or we can let our own experience pierce the tough outer layer of our heart and open us to compassion, becoming more complete human being in the process..
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