Our daughter made several similar paintings. She brought one to me, and a different one to her dad. As she handed them to us, she looked at us very sternly and said, "This one is for you. You get what you get and you don't get upset."
How much time have I wasted comparing roughly equal things and worrying that I didn't get the best one? We do it with little things like lanes on the highway and registers at the supermarket, and bigger things like our homes and our jobs. There's a freedom in the preschool approach to these things: If everyone gets what they need, then you can let go of whether or not you got the purple marker this time.
Our Ash Wednesday litany of penitence asks us to confess "our anger at our own frustration and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves." Then we confess "our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty." I think the two tendencies are deeply related. The more we worry about whether we came out on top, the less we notice who ended up on the bottom.
No comments:
Post a Comment