The thoughtful comments to the last
post here and at my main blog are forcing me to look further into this murky topic.
Having established that what my own particular guilt-harpy
keeps harping about is that I'm guilty of Squandering
My Gifts and Not
Living Up to My Potential the logical next question is:
what exactly are these gifts or potential which I'm supposedly
not living up to? Do they exist at all or are they yet another
mirage? Another false concept plugged into my brain by the
competitive, egocentric, celebrity-obsessed culture we live
in?
Well, you know, maybe.
But I don't think so. What I think, what I know gut-wise,
is that I really do have gifts I'm not using. It's not
vanity or arrogance to say so because gifts are gifts
and the real reason why the exasperating little
guilt-bug keeps buzzing around me is because it knows that
I know that I'm built to fly but settle for crawling - I
crawl very well but that ain't flying - and I'm designed
to burn bright but settle for flickering, a flicker flicker
here, a flicker there.
You may say ah, but that's what we
are: crawling, flickering creatures, doing our best against
all the odds. Well if that's what you'll say, I'll have to
disagree. Because what I really know down in my deepest
of deep guts is that many of us have a locked cellar full
of unused gifts - or maybe just one unused gift. It's not
a thing, not even a talent, but a degree of feeling. It
doesn't necessarily mean achievement or success in worldly
terms. It means being willing to risk flying, Icarus-like.
MORE
Are you pursued by it? Does
it wake you in the morning and stand over your bed at night,
sometimes even following you into your dreams? Is it beside
you as you sit at your computer screen right now, asking
why you're not doing something you should be doing? Has it
whined inside your head so often and for so long that you
take it for granted, like the ticking of a clock or a tickle
in the throat? Very like the ticking of a clock since it
keeps on nagging about all the time you've wasted in
the past, are wasting now and will waste in future.
Can you tell that by YOU I
mean ME?
Does your guilt ressemble my guilt? No? If you are one of
the fortunate few who can do that living-in-the-now thing
without feeling guilty, then arrivederci:
go and smell the roses while I and the rest of us guilt-prisoners
examine the walls of our cells and ponder our escape.
Let me make clear first of all that
I don't want to get rid of guilt completely. I just want
it to stay in its place and speak only when necessary. For
example to indicate politely that the stone I've just tripped
over is exactly the same one I tripped over last week or
last year. A kind of unobtrusive, gentle Dr.Watson to my
dynamic Sherlock Holmes. What I don't want is
to be dominated, harassed, bullied, interrupted and nagged
by a mere concept, a chimera, a mirage.
What does it look like anyway?
Has anyone ever seen a Guilt? I don't mean the kind
that could be and should be haunting you if you've done something
really really bad, but just the average,
non-descript, irritating voice-over which never stops droning
that....uh....what exactly is it droning?
