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Don't use what makes you happy to make someone else sad.
I know people who can never be happy unless they compare their joy with a negative in someone else's situation. If they get a new toy, it's not just a good toy, it's better than so-and-so's. If they accompliish something positive it's because they were smarter than someone else...
You know the type, maybe. They are ecstatic about some good fortune of theirs until they can't beat someone else over the head with it. You can almost see them deflate, their joy seeping out of them...
And it's not that their toy isn't better or that they weren't smarter - it's that their joy probably wouldn't exist without someone else's lack of joy. What kind of pleasure is that?
Joy should be, I think, a completely positive thing. If your joy is based on comparisms to what someone else is or has, then REAL joy will forever be out of your reach.
Only someone who is, at their inner self, unhappy needs this - call it Competition Joy or Showoff Joy. What will happen to them when others have more than them? Will they be able to find joy in their lives when they have no one else's situation to look down over?
No, joy should be what it is: just joy for itself. Joy in your best times and in your worst times. God-given and pure.
We should never focus on someone else's misfortune in order to see our own joy. My being able to fill my home with roses is nice, but not if I use it to point out the stink in someone else's home.
Just saying.
I know people who can never be happy unless they compare their joy with a negative in someone else's situation. If they get a new toy, it's not just a good toy, it's better than so-and-so's. If they accompliish something positive it's because they were smarter than someone else...
You know the type, maybe. They are ecstatic about some good fortune of theirs until they can't beat someone else over the head with it. You can almost see them deflate, their joy seeping out of them...
And it's not that their toy isn't better or that they weren't smarter - it's that their joy probably wouldn't exist without someone else's lack of joy. What kind of pleasure is that?
Joy should be, I think, a completely positive thing. If your joy is based on comparisms to what someone else is or has, then REAL joy will forever be out of your reach.
Only someone who is, at their inner self, unhappy needs this - call it Competition Joy or Showoff Joy. What will happen to them when others have more than them? Will they be able to find joy in their lives when they have no one else's situation to look down over?
No, joy should be what it is: just joy for itself. Joy in your best times and in your worst times. God-given and pure.
We should never focus on someone else's misfortune in order to see our own joy. My being able to fill my home with roses is nice, but not if I use it to point out the stink in someone else's home.
Just saying.
Peace
--Free
