antecoitus

One of the most precious lessons I have learned in life is that there are two types of pride people choose to cling on to. I do not prefer to call arrogance, self-righteousness, or lording over people, pride. I call it insecurity.

Pride is that which makes you inadvertently guard honor and reputation.

The first type makes you greatly careful about your decisions so that you can protect your values, your integrity and your opinion of yourself. In the extreme it produces a bit of an anal-retentive behaviour (also indigestion, a lot of cigarettes and sometimes even ulcer). But people who succeed in keeping this type of pride, usually end up quite content with themselves. It definitely does not mean being averse to risk - exchanging cartwheels with briefcases- it just means you try to make the best choice that your conscience and your heart leads you to in every situation, hope that things don’t go awfully wrong, and own up to them.

The second type is what I refer to as quicksand pride. Have you ever had that time in your life when in order to protect your image of yourself as someone who very rarely makes mistakes, to follow society’s demands or  to cover up into admitting something wrong that you did to save face,
you made one more wrong turn? Your pride tells you to prove that you actually meant to do it, so, you made another wrong one. You further indulged into several other wrong turns in order to reinforce that actually it was all intentional, and that you are still right. Then you find yourself one day wondering, how come you ended up here where you do not know who you are. Worse, nobody does. That’s quicksand pride. Its not malicious, but it sucks you in with precision.

I hope I never land on quicksand, even if it means a larger hole in my gut.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.