Rejection and scarcity - our misunderstood allies
A couple of days ago, my friend mentioned he thinks the idea of the Christmas Eve is anachronistic, at least in the West and much of democratic Europe. Back when he was a child and teenager, there was still socialism in our country, so goods like bananas, tropical fruit or better/more stylish clothing were considered a luxury, except perhaps for the small number of people at the helm of politics.
Today, it seems like the situation is inverse, where only a small amount of people in these parts of the world struggle to physically survive. I think the material abundance came at the cost of lower mental acuity. I never knew material scarcity and the abstraction of mental scarcity is therefore even more difficult to grasp for me. I had to get around to eventually understand at least a part of it, because not too long ago, I was not even able to understand the lowest societal requirements; all I could see around me were people hating or being cynical about their life, so I figured I could just do without all that hassle and indulge in my addiction.
Scarcity is to stay in our lives. I am free to choose any job, yet most of them would suck for me, given my unique skill-sets and beliefs. I am free to talk to any woman, yet most of them won't be truly interested in me and vice versa. I am free to do anything, yet there's the ultimate scarcity of time which has wiped out everything up to this day. There's only a finite amount of things we can be good at in our lives and we become good at something by failing in it over and over and over again.
It's important to cherish the failures, even more than successes. Failures usually get a bad reputation not because of what actually happened or what didn't happen, but because we forgot to focus on the process. Embrace the suckage when it happens, learn what you can from it and try again.
Oddly enough, the failures are imprinted into my brain deeper than successes, so I can learn from them. Sometimes they even morph into one another, for example in the case of romantic relationships.
Success is easy and it doesn't need to be remembered, because it happens all the time. Can I walk? Yes, success. Can I type? Yes, success. Can I read what I type? Yes, success. Repeated success without any novelty gets boring over time. From this stems the addiction to success and then we HATE when things do not go our way. However, the failure to fail is fatal.
Scarcity and gratitude seem to happily co-exist together. It's difficult to feel grateful for something you lack and think you need. Conversely, it is easy to feel ungrateful and take something for granted. When was the last time you slept outside of your comfortable bed? When was the last time you fasted? Are you addicted to comfort, physical or mental?
We have to invite scarcity and failure into our lives, but in a smart way. Don't go and run a marathon, if the last time you ran was to catch a bus a month ago. You have the responsibility to know yourself and decide on the optimal load you can bear reliably and consistently in each and every area of your life. Nobody else is going to do that for you.
This is Martin "Ikar" Čermák, until next week (and year!), out.
