Great balls of fire, there’s a lot going on in the world, and it’s Ash Wednesday — a.k.a. the starting gun of the liturgical church-calendar period known as Lent.
Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter; traditionally it’s a time for self-examination, self-denial, a doubling-down on your spiritual aspect. In particular you contemplate mortality, a forbidden concept in America. Kind of like taxes or modesty.
People give up one little indulgence for Lent: television or sugar or coffee or clickbait.
This year, I’m giving up self-pity. Or trying to.
If you know me or have been following Spiritual/Skeptical/Classical, you’ll know that the last several years have not been a walk in the park for me. Sometimes I’m mature and philosophical about it; too often though, inwardly I seethe in resentment and anger.
And self-pity. That’s the big one. Why me? Why can’t I have her life? Or his life? Why isn’t it me getting a great new job or leaving for Portugal? Why have all my best-laid plans gone straight to hell?
But I’ve had it. I’ve had it with myself, these old thought patterns. I’m poisoning my own well and the company of the people I love. I need to move on in a big way, even as the world seems to be going to pieces.
So what’s my strategy? I’ve come up with a few bullet points.
1. Writing down my self-pitying thoughts whenever I catch myself at them. I’ve toiled at enough corporate gigs to have picked up some scientific management principles. Whatever your goal, you’ve got to be able to quantify and measure progress. Just putting down in words any thought that counts as whining, whinging, whimpering, pissing-and-moaning, griping, kvetching, grumbling, sniveling, or belly-aching will help me see it all a little more objectively.
2. Think and act out of character. It’s not enough to track your lapses, you have to challenge yourself and stumble into becoming. You have to be willing to speak and act in ways that will startle the people who think they know you. And if they can’t handle you changing or growing, maybe they were never your friends in the first place.
3. Engage in at least one community service or stewardship project. For the record: I’m not proud now of the way I disengaged during last year’s election. I used my career freefall and the demands of tech-writing school as an excuse to bow out of things like get-out-the-vote efforts.
Who’s sorry now? Was it really so impossible to find a civic opportunity that would have been a networking opportunity as well?
Well, that was then, this is now. This is San Francisco and there’s plenty to pitch in with.
That’s my program for now. I hope to write more about this experience around Easter. As always, thanks for reading!
