“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.” --Henry Ward Beecher
Ever since I stumbled
upon a guru who said “If you’re angry you’re stupid.”
I’ve been angry.
I am tired of all this BS about how wonderful we should be. We
can’t even use our God-given emotions to
express ourselves, for heaven sake.
That’s stupid.
If I were being chewed on
by a lion, I’d be pretty pissed off.
See why I shut down my
website Brunch for the Soul?
While I believe in Brunch, and I believe in the Soul, I have
too much of an edge to write about it, except in the terms I am about to put forth.
I knew I could write about the soul, and I knew I had
psychological insight, but also I didn’t want to be syrupy sweet. I didn’t want
to stand in front of a mirror and tell
myself how beautiful I was. If I knew I was beautiful
I wouldn’t need to stand in front of a mirror and tell myself lies.
If I knew I was rich, I
wouldn’t have to give myself affirmations about richness. I would be it.
All this belief that we
ought to be happy all the time is just telling us that we aren’t.
If we feel unhappy, we feel bad
about being unhappy.
Then we feel guilty. Then we feel bad about
feeling guilty. If we
get angry, we feel bad about feeling
angry. If
we make a mistake, we feel bad about our ineptitude.
We wonder what’s wrong with us, and that little voice at the
back of our head agrees with our badness and
says, yep, you’re not good enough.
No wonder people go out and shoot things/people
up.
If this loop has ever caught you, you know
what I am talking about.
You are going to feel bad sometimes. You are
going to be angry. So what?
You’re
human. If you’re an animal, know that yep,
you’re going to get angry too.
Humans, though, have a particular brain that
thinks about what it is thinking. I don’t know if animals do.
This morning as I perused Instagram (I
do love it) I saw pictures that were so gorgeous and of far-away places that they
looked straight out of National Geographic. Normally, I oh and ah, but this
morning, I said, “Oh for heaven's sake.”
I felt small in photographing my red peony
carried into the kitchen from my backyard.
Hey, it’s my life, and I’m not apologizing
for it.
Comparison is something we can drop too.
Know that I love you,
Joyce
P.S. Brunch for the Soul morphed into this: Don't know how it will twist yet.
