Pride

The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré 

Pride is a terrible thing. We have all acted on our pride which has led to not so good places in our lives. Pride has led to the end of friendships, families, and people that we love to no longer be in our lives. Pride has also been expanded upon throughout histories such as the ego and narcissism. The painting above represents to tower of Babel, where the pride of people had the idea of trying to reach heaven. They didn't make it and instead, God made them all speak different languages making everyone babel...bummer. With my last post about gluttony, you the reader can see where I am going with my blog. Pride can be split into a good and bad. Someone with an inflated ego is bad, but someone with high self-esteem is good. See how this could be seen as the same person with two drastic perceptions? I can't vouch for every society, but where I am right now and the culture that I live in, pride has ruined a lot of people and I believe I know why.

Failure

No one looks forward to failure. No one gets excited to fail. No one goes out of the way to fail, well not intentionally. Failure is such an important thing in our lives and this was first told to me when I was 18 in my music theory class. My professor told me that he enjoys failing so he can learn how not to fail. At that time I couldn't fully grasp what he was going for in that, but he was right. We are so afraid of failure that when we do fail it is detrimental. Now for all my doctor and pilot readers out there, failure has a heavier consequence on your vocation, but for everyone else, failure is, in fact, a good thing if you can learn from it. No one is perfect and with that should have some comfort when we mess up in our lives. Failure is not in vain if we can better ourselves afterward. We all want to be better, but we have to fail to achieve greatness. I know that I have learned so much from my failures that a book, class, or training could never teach me. Failure teaches us what we shouldn't say, do, and who we are in our culture. Pride prevents us from this when we choose not to admit that we fail. With that being said, I know failure is a bad thing. I know failure has consequences tied to it, which for some can be life-changing. Getting fired due to failure, a failed marriage, failure to past tests, and seeing other fail is difficult. I am in no way trying to silver line failure and I am not saying that failure is a wonderful thing, but failure does have a purpose in our lives. Failure can lead to greatness as long as we do not let our pride alter our perception to believe that we did nothing wrong. Failure can make us better as long as we can take responsibility.

Responsibility

I will be the first to say that it is so hard to admit you are wrong. I hate being wrong because that means I did not know something that someone else did. As I write out this last sentence, it doesn't sound so bad, does it? Feels good to be right, to know something that someone else doesn't especially in the case they attempted to prove you wrong. Why does this make us feel good? Why does the argument of me being right on something pointless make me feel so good about myself? If you are wrong, now you know, and you're not wrong anymore. You know something new, you learn, and now you more educated. I feel like we all could be more educated on something. Do you think the world would be better if people were just more educated? I try not to get mad at someone for not knowing something. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't their fault for not knowing something. I think the issue is choosing not to use the knowledge we have learned. I feel that is the downfall of all of us. Our pride clouds our logic. When we attempt to do something even though we know it will fail. I believe that is the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Pride makes us foolish and we accomplish nothing from it. On the other foot, pride can be a terrible thing when someone does fail.

Blame

Every day I try to reframe from blame. It is so easy to blame someone for failing, but in the long run, it serves no purpose. I don't see how blaming someone resolves an issue. Bringing someone down doesn't move us forward on anything. I understand to identify who caused a problem and addressing and/or educating that person what and why they failed, but I feel that if we offered a solution towards someone failure instead of stating the obvious of their poor actions, we could accomplish more in our lives. I am very good at blaming people. I do it all the time, and almost everytime is just to bring someone else down to bring myself up. I blame others so I can look better to other people. That's not the life I want to live. If we truly bring other people up, we come up with them. I have a lot to work on that. I know it will take a while.

Humble

Pride will be my downfall. Pride makes us do stupid things in our lives. We are all going to fail and we will see others fail in life. We need to help each other and understand that being mad at someone is a completely understandable thing. There is nothing wrong with being angry at someone for failing, but bringing them down does not resolve anything. We need to let go of grudges and admit that we make stupid choices. Some of the most intelligent people have made stupid choices, but that doesn't mean they are any less intelligent. There is no such thing as perfection in humanity. We are all going to fail, and sometimes, we are going to fail really bad. We are going to fail miserably, the ole crash and burn. The question is, how much better would it be to have people help you up when you fail. To make such an awful experience into a learning moment. I think we all could grow to be better. To drop the pride and admit that we too make poor decisions. Now, this doesn't mean everytime you fail is going to be okay. Life happens and bad things come into our lives that we cannot stop no matter how bad we try and stop it, but if we choose to help you when you fail as you would help us when we fail, I believe we all could change for a better future. As the Italian proverb states, " After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box". We all need to work on abandoning our pride and stay humble.