Tag Archives: jealousy

Aspen

Aspen: (n) a municipality which is the county seat and most populous city of Pitkin County, Colorado. dictionary with letter A

Often we must drive through the cold to get to the hot.

It is a fact of life which we forget because self-pity is so readily available in our repertoire.

Last year I went through a distressing time, when I questioned many of my talents, aspirations and mostly, my fortunes. I took a couple of months just to self-examine.

Such introspection is very fruitful at first, but after a while can become dangerous, as you start slicing into your bones. Soon I needed a way of escape.

I had immobilized myself and was desperately in need of an exit strategy. So I made a quick plan to escape my season of self-perusal and started to move back into the land of the living.

Yet my plan of action really sucked.

So I found myself on Easter Sunday morning driving through the Rocky Mountains with snow falling all around me in my vehicle that was less than suitable for such a wintry mix, wondering if I was going to slide off the mountain into the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

Along the way, I passed a town in Colorado called Aspen.

It is filled with expensive bungalows and lodges to accommodate the more wealthy members of our society, who want to get away and pretend to ski, while spending most of their time sitting by the fire in $1000-dollar outfits, sipping well-pickled cider.

(As you can see, I was a little resentful of their prosperity.)

I was not destitute, but certainly lacking the funds to make me totally content.

  • Maybe it was the cold.
  • Maybe it was the drippy snow.
  • Or maybe it was a lacking in my character.

But I started to feel sorry for myself. It was so silly.

I was just driving through some cold to get to a warmer place. It happens.

I suppose if you have enough zeroes at the end of your bank account balance instead of in the front, then Aspen could be a very nice place to visit.

On that particular Easter morning, it was a chilling reminder of my depleted condition as I quietly drove on … seeking for resurrection.

 

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Antecedent

dictionary with letter A

Antecedent: (n) A thing or event that existed or logically precedes another.

I, for one, am personally enraged over the comment.

“All’s fair in love and war.”

I don’t know who had the audacity to throw love and war into the same mix and assume that they are achieved through similar motivations.

There is an antecedent to love, and certainly a different one to war. The two are not the same. And one would have to be extraordinarily cynical to believe that they are triggered by similar emotions.

Matter of fact, if you can find the antecedent, you can pretty well guarantee love, or at least something that is a delightful replica.

And if you insist on the antecedent for war, grab your helmet and grenades.

I believe the antecedent for love is contentment.

I’ve never seen two people who allow the seeds of discontentment to take root who can maintain their affection, but instead, become picky and fussy with one another.

What is contentment? Contentment is a decision to find our joy and peace of mind working with what we’ve got instead of complaining about what we lack.

The antecedent for war is jealousy.

It manifests itself sometimes as greed. Other times it parades around as ambition. But somehow or another we convince ourselves that what other people possess was misappropriated and needs to be taken away from them by force and placed into our stockpile.

What is jealousy? It is a lack of contentment because we’ve convinced ourselves that in some way we’ve been cheated or that someone we considered to be our inferior has risen to the occasion to be our equal.

As you can see, love and war have no similarity with each other whatsoever. Matter of fact, love would find it difficult to spew hundreds of bullets into the night air against unseen faces which just happen to be wearing unacceptable uniforms.

“All is not fair in love and war.”

Love doesn’t look for fairness. It works towards compatibility.

Of course, war is never fair. It’s the illusion of superiority… which always makes us look puny.

 

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