“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
–Carl Jung
Just had some nice talks with Valentine and Marsha today about how often we blame others for our limitations. The ego has a special mantra for this: “Someone else needs to change.”
But there’s a small problem with this attitude, because it turns out that we can’t change other people. In fact, calling someone else a “problem” has the effect of making them stubbornly refuse to change, somehow.
If we were to call this “problem” an “opportunity,” on the other hand, only then might it have a chance of inviting a solution. But for that to happen, we will have to make a compromise, to offer up one of our core beliefs. We have to move from “I’m totally sure about this” to “I’m not so sure anymore” to “Hmm, I could be totally wrong about this.” That usually happens after our car has been stalled for a loooooong time. Abandoned. The wheels have fallen off. The motor and tires have been stolen. The seats may even have been torched.
In any event, we become so sick of waiting for Someone Else To Change that we are finally ready to change ourselves. So we ask for a little…
Help!
…and lo!, it’s enough to open up to this moment of doubt and suddenly a new, more expansive level of thinking can rush in.
We’re all so stubborn, but once we start to see that being sure of things is so very difficult to erase, so time-consuming to undo, we learn to stop committing ourselves so whole-heartedly to our opinions. We start allowing the fact that maybe, just maybe, we don’t know very much at all. Actually, we begin to welcome this idea; it doesn’t weigh as much and we can turn much faster.
Suffice to say that if you are a truth-seeker – and I hope you are – as soon as you believe that someone else has a problem, you will immediately open the door to the possibility that you, too, have that same problem. First you didn’t see it, now a light has been magically shown onto it.
First you said, “Change!” Now you say, “Thanks!”
And as you yourself change, you magically discover that the other person no longer suffers from “their problem.”
Were they just acting out a role… just to piss us off? Just to Help Us Grow?
“Um… thanks!”
Joy Biscuits 