Seeing my weakness through yours.
Life is a journey of joy and sorrows. Sometimes we climb to the heights of our potential, and see horizons to conquer and destinies to fulfill. On other occasions we fall hard and fast into the wake of our own weakness; beaten not by the power of others, but led into darkness on the leash of our own deficiencies.
And we suffer.
And yet we are so different from one another that it can sometimes be hard to understand how another person has the weakness they do. I have found myself at times wondering why someone doesn’t just ‘do’ something that appears to me so easy, and so necessary.
Yet I am reminded of the things in my life that I consistently struggle with. I wrote a while ago about how “my light creates my shadow’, trying to reconcile my gifts with my weaknesses, and seeing that often one creates the other.
My creativity, my improvisational skills and my continually moving brain also contribute to my difficulties in focusing, and to my terrible weakness of conscientiousness.
If you could sit over my shoulder, and watch me through the day, I’m confident that you would become highly frustrated as you see me waste time over and over again, like a child who has too many things to see, to many things to do.
And I’m sure that you would stare aghast my failure to execute on the many small and simple tasks that slip away, and wonder how it is that I even function in the world sometimes.
Do you ever feel this way about people in your life, maybe not with these specific issues, but with other types of problems? I’m guessing you do, or have, and probably will again, until you fully accept and understand your own weaknesses, and begin to see your weakness as the same problem, just in a different manifestation.
In truth, we all struggle, fall and hopefully rise again.
The next time you find yourself frustrated with another weakness, I invite you to substitute your own in its place. Try to understand your own feelings of weakness, and see the weakness of others through that lens.
I promise you that as you see yourself in the failings of another, your heart will soften as you come to see that we are all beset by a swath of human problems, that tempt, try, temper and torment us all.
None of us are exempt, none of us are beyond.
All of us are one.
--Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings