“Doing stuff is hard, shout-out to anyone doing anything.” – unknown
Last night as I was taking out the food scraps to the compost bin, I saw a bunny nestled by a tree. I got down low in the evening light to try to get a closer look. It was the same color as the bunny I saved when my cat brought a baby bunny in the house a couple of months ago. I started to feel some kinship and pride with this little creature – maybe this was the bunny I rescued from the jaws of my cat.
And as soon as I did that, I felt the reflex to believe pride was a bad thing. You know, one of the seven deadly sins and all that. Perhaps I shouldn’t personalize this bunny at all because its survival was 99% not about me.
Here’s the thing that I’m thinking as I type this. Is there a middle ground? Because on the morning the cat brought a baby bunny in, I managed to get the cat put away downstairs and shooed the bunny safely away. ALL without waking my kids and I got a video so I could show them.
No, I’m not responsible for the survival of the bunny in the big picture. But I did step in for a moment when the bunny’s life teetered between chaos and freedom. I got my butt off the meditation cushion for long enough to feel the pulse of life and opted for action. Which is a great of why I bother to meditate – to pay attention to the sacred moments as I described in my post Sacred Time.
If we can’t feel the reward for moments when we do act well because pride is a sin, do we undercut our own feedback cycle? And I’m not talking about a conscious decision not to celebrate the win – I’m talking about generations upon generations of family tradition to endeavor to be humble, maybe even falsely humble.
So I checked Brené Brown’s definition of pride from Atlas of the Heart. “Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments.” She added that pride related to an accomplishment has a positive connotation and is differentiated from hubris. Sometimes we refer to this authentic pride.
I officially write this post feeling proud. I saved a bunny and maybe I even saw that bunny again last night. I think celebrating our good moments is worth mentioning. Don’t you?
Surprised By Joy 