One of the hardest lessons for us to learn is that our most important task and number one priority should be our own spiritual growth, improvement, and maturity. And if that sounds selfish, it’s because we haven’t yet made enough progress ourselves to see how it’s the one path to growing more self-less. Only when we are becoming inwardly whole and good can we do our proper good for others. But we are by nature outwardly oriented. And that's an evolutionary survival trait. Improvement is important to us, but we'd rather improve our circumstances, or our friends and family members, or the entire rest of the world than ourselves. We're fine, we easily assume. They've got the problem.
One of my guilty pleasures used to be watching the various incarnations of "The Real Housewives" mock reality shows on Bravo TV, until I just couldn't take it anymore. The dominant theme and attitude on the part of any cast member in any challenging situation seemed to be "I deserve better than this!" It was a show about aggrieved egos on parade, or in other words, about more of us than we'd like to admit. Jesus had a funny way of talking about how much time we spend spotting the speck in the eye of another when we have a log in our own. That was his little nudge toward a refocus and concern for improving ourselves before we tackle all the inner problems of others.
When we're not experiencing Nirvana day to day, we easily blame others, or anything else in our circumstances, rather than considering the part that we ourselves might be playing in our own discontent. But if that rare realization dawns on us decisively and we actually act on it, we quickly feel astonished at how long it took us to see what then becomes the most obvious truth, that it's how we react to the world, more than the world itself, which determines the way we feel, day-to-day. If we can learn to manage our expectations better, or at some level release them altogether, shift our center of attention from how we ourselves are doing to how we can help others around us, just inwardly smile with God, and adopt a different framing attitude for all that's around us, we can attain an inner peace and even stretches of joy never seen on Bravo.
