Pride – it’s a funny and volatile thing.  It can be a really good thing to have – pride in your work, your accomplishments, (as long as you aren’t resting on any laurels) pride in your friend’s or family’s accomplishments, etc . What we must remember is, as in many a tragedy, it cometh before a fall – especially if it’s the wrong kind of pride.

So many people in today’s society, with its competitive materialistic nature, have the wrong kind of pride.  They hate to lose face, to lose out to someone else.  If someone is doing well and they are not, it’s hard to honour their achievements – instead, many resort to lying about themselves, their lives, their work in order to “live up” to what they perceive other people might think of them, or simply to make themselves feel better.  But how can living a lie make anyone feel better?

We can fool ourselves so easily, so quickly.  We are terribly manipulative creatures, especially the “smarter” ones.   I’m sure everyone can remember a time when they have manipulated someone, or something, more than likely for worse than for better. We learn this from a very young age.

No one is perfect.  But more and more, people are doing it in an attempt to save face because their lives may be empty, or unfulfilling in some way.   Perhaps they don’t even consider the repercussions of their pride – how it might affect others.  We can be terribly self-indulgent creatures.  Perhaps the key word here is indulgence – “the act or practice of indulging;  gratification of desire”. When those desires aren’t met, we can create all sorts of scenarios to either manipulate them into being, or create alternate realities where they do exist (even if it is in our own minds).  We have a terrible, horrible dis-ease.

We put on faces – we put on a disguise, to guard our often wounded pride.  This is a thin disguise, however – how quickly do we see through these fronts?  We can usually tell when someone is being genuine, and when they are being deceitful.   The song isn’t clear, or it is out of tune, or trying too hard, being too loud – poetic imagery, I know, but I like it.

Perhaps what we need is to establish boundaries between need and desire.  Gods above – there goes every marketing department and the entire advertisement industry!  If we didn’t concentrate on our desires so much, then perhaps we wouldn’t be so competitive.  Nature competes out of need – here at the beginning of Spring, on the cusp of the equinoxal tide, before Jack in the Green has let loose with his wild abandon and all green and growing things are trying to choke each other out in their effort to survive (note – in their need, not desire) – in this calm before the storm we can gain a little perspective.  We can take stock of what we need, and what we desire, and work towards the former.

Would that then change the nature of our pride?