A snippet to overhear...
Become an eavesdropper on a letter I wrote to a favorite author. This is a paragraph taken from my senior thesis. I'd rather say it's one of my favorites.
A few months ago, as I read SK’s The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air, I found the same analysis. In his discourse on Joy, SK wrote that when we do not live today for today, when our anxiety forces us to live in the past and the future, we never experience joy. I wrote in my marginal notes that “when I compare myself to my past self, or when I compare myself to my future self, I am robbed of experiencing joy today.” Initially, I thought that came with some inability of mine to stay focused on the present and keep my eyes and my feet in front of me. It doesn’t seem so sinful when I conclude those directions. A little pep talk throughout the day would keep the yucky comparison away. Yet, I realize now how that avoided a harsher, more uncomfortable truth. I cannot experience joy for today as today while I compare myself to the past or the future because my pride wants me to be better right now than those other versions of myself. You said that “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.1 It’s the “er” that gets me. I have no pleasure—I have no joy when I wonder whether I’ll finally be happy when I get ______ (this job, that fellowship, this man, that houseplant, this ceramic mug) or when I look back and see I was thinner, funnier, wealthier, therefore I was happier. This permanent dissatisfaction comes from my pride always hungering for more; the accumulation of whatever I have is never enough.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 122.
Good points!