Living With Consciousness: Beware the Motes in Other People's Eyes!

In the field of counseling and self development, there's an old truism that whatever we dislike the most about others is generally what we dislike the most in ourselves.

Yes, absolutely, it's a cliché, and we can usually come up with a dozen ways in which it is not true.

And yet? Much such truisms tend to have a "greater than 50%" grain of truth.

It can sometimes be an eye-opening and not very pleasant experience to realize that some of these things that we find so annoying and unattractive in fact are the embodiment of many of our own habits. And it's often one of the reasons why many people don't want to do in-depth personal work because they'd rather not come face to face with these things... or hypocrisies, as it were.

For example, to use as a metaphor the old Aesop's Fable about "The Grasshopper and the Ants," I have always felt less than benevolent towards those I perceived to be life's "grasshoppers."

In this case, my perception of life's grasshoppers are those who just kind of jog through life in a happy-go-lucky fashion without really paying any attention to anything, never plan ahead and whenever something goes wrong the responsibility for mopping up their lack of planning and foresight tends to fall on everybody around them because they're not actually going to take responsibility and do anything to address the situation.

And usually they have little understanding why anyone is suddenly being upset about it all...

But why this resentment I feel?

Well one of the things I have had come to terms with is that I would just as well sit around and do nothing and were not for the fact that I have "felt forced" to do otherwise I probably would sit around and do nothing... and thus I am ultimately also a "grasshopper" myself... at least in my heart.

I suppose we could argue that in the functional execution of my life I am more like an ant: diligent, planning ahead and constantly working, but that is actually the part of life that I dislike the most. I'd just as well sit still and just watch the flowers grow, and not have a care in the world!

I have almost zero ambition (never did!) and very little drive to "accomplish."

We often fail to uncover those things we dislike about others in ourselves because they are not always painfully obvious, in fact much of the time they are rather subtle and hidden by layers of suggestion and metaphor.

Does it really matter whether we know where these emotional land mines are?

Don't know; maybe it's "for informational purposes only." For me, having awareness and puzzling it through has definitely helped me withhold judgment a little more readily.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!

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Created at 2023-07-22 00:28 PDT
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