Tag: pride

Getting the Best of My Common Sense

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“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” – Bertrand Russell

My 83-year-old mom had a ping pong accident this week. One minute she was playing a game at her senior residence and the next she dove for the ball, fell on a cot-like thing, hit the rail with her back and was injured enough that the firemen, paramedics and ambulance came and she was on her way to the hospital.

She’s out of the hospital now and doing fine. With a couple of cracked ribs and a little bit of bleeding, the injury is painful but nowhere near as serious as it could have been. She’s chalked the whole thing up to “her competitive nature getting the best of her common sense.”

I’m fascinated by that phrase because I can think of any number of things that have gotten the best of my common sense. Usually pride and stubbornness because I’m not particularly competitive. All the times I’ve carried too much (I’m thinking of my post about efficiency), haven’t asked for help, and stayed at something far too long.

And it seems to be passed down in families. The other day Miss O wasn’t feeling well and I asked her if she wanted to cancel anything or take a rest and her answer could have come right from my mouth. “NO! I’m fine, I’ve got this!”

On the other hand, the things I do out of love almost never make common sense. I’m thinking of the time I celebrated my friend Phil’s 400th ascent of Mt Rainier by buying 400 of each his favorite mountaineering provisions. The cough drops and tea bags were fine but the chips and the cookies were quite voluminous so that I ended up delivering 8 storage bins full of stuff.

In honor of my mom, I’m taking a deeper look at what gets the best of my common sense. For the times I extend myself out of love, I’m keeping it. But if I’m extending myself out of duty or pride, I’m going to try to let it go.

Because sometimes when we lunge for things we end up in the hospital. The good thing about taking a dive at a senior residence is that there’s a good portion of the population that can’t remember the gossip. A woman with a great sense of humor but maybe not such a good memory said to my mom when she returned from the hospital, “I heard something about you but now I can’t remember what.”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Authentic Pride

Posted in meditationTagged , , , 51 Comments

“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?

An Honest Mistake

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“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

I wrote a post for today to celebrate one year of doing a post every day. Then I looked back at my posts to confirm whether it was May 19th or May 18th when I started the practice, I found that I skipped a post on June 11th. Damn! If I hadn’t looked, I could have posted my victory lap and it would have been an honest mistake but once I knew, then I couldn’t celebrate because it became a dishonest mistake.

Not that I think anyone who reads the blog would have noticed. In fact, there could be some followers who wished I skipped more than one day, if you know what I mean… 😉

But somehow it matters to me because I think that if I’m going to go to the effort to write about my life, I might as well be as honest as I can be. I’m sure I have blind spots that keep me from seeing who I am in totality but at the very least I can not believe the BS my brain produces when I see it. Because when I do buy into the fiction, it just wraps one more layer between me and my experience of life that keeps me from feeling the beautiful, joyful, and yes, sometimes gritty reality.

I dated a guy when I was in my early 30’s who was always telling me what a nice guy he was. He’d usually say that as an addendum to a story he’d be relating from work or his first marriage that involved a kerfuffle of some sort. And because he got into a lot of disagreements that related to him needing to be in control or not listening very well, he had to tell me quite often what a nice guy he was. I think he really thought of himself that way but (and this probably goes without saying) I think that he was many things good and bad but objectively speaking, he wasn’t that nice of a guy.

Reflecting on the relevance of this to life, I went looking through Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart to find the section on Places We Go To Self-Assess. There are three definitions offered there:

“Pride: Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts.”

“Hubris: Hubris is an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments.”

“Humility: Humility is openness to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth.”

I loved that Brené Brown includes that word humility derives from the Latin word meaning groundedness. So I’m practicing humility to try to accurately assess my blogging contribution and opportunities for growth until I actually reach the 365 days of posting. And then I’ll celebrate the milestone with pride, not hubris, I hope!

Anyone else meet a “nice” guy that wasn’t? Or discovered an honest mistake recently?

(featured photo from Pexels)