I was so selfish I didn’t even know I was hurting people.  This includes myself.  I read in the Master Key System that there is defeat in every selfish thought.  I had never put this together before and it was so true it scared me. What else was I unaware of?I started thinking about the different ways I was so incredibly selfish.  Mainly it was with my time.  I am a loner so I would choose my own company over my family’s.  I have to live every, single day with the regret of not spending time with my grandmother before she died.  I know she wouldn’t want me feel bad about it, so I quickly change my thought to that, but it’s still there.  It’s magical thinking to believe regrets like that go completely away.  They don’t unless you get Alzheimer’s or are a sociopath which I’m doubting because you wouldn’t be reading  this if you were.

Life unfolds through its circle and completes our regrets, but they still don’t go away, they just fade.  Learning to live with some of my regrets has been hard.  It’s a combination of forgiving myself and owning my selfishness so it’s complicated and needs to be simplified. For my selfishness to not be in vain, I must use it to help others.  If we don’t have regrets, we haven’t been living.  I have never met an unscathed person, but I’m sure I wouldn’t like them.  It seems that throughout my life I’ve attracted and chosen to spend time with people who have had my similar pains.

When I look back at the times I spent with my family growing up,  I hold onto the memories and try to not let them fade.  I was a child during a lot of these memories and it’s disturbing that I didn’t know I was living the best parts of my life.  I guess it’s supposed to be that way.  It also disturbs me that in my adulthood, most of my best memories haven’t been my best times, and most of my best times haven’t been my best memories.  One of my favorite  things to do is sit at my computer and write and the memory of this isn’t real exciting.  It seems like my mind plays tricks on me by being dishonest about what really happened so I can enjoy the memory.  I’m a realist so this doesn’t go over very well and I simply can’t allow it.

Another way I was selfish  was by gossiping.  The act of it is obvious, but I realized that at work I would talk behind someone’s back, then later spend time having a conversation with them.  I was using them for the pleasure of conversation and this was not only dreadfully selfish, it was a complete waste of time.  Looking back, I knew this deep inside.  The symptom was I never gave them my undivided attention. Rude and selfish.  I don’t want to be that person.

I’ve been very blessed in my life to have traveled.  It opened my mind and removed a lot of smallness.  I used to let other people’s smallness irritate me and it was selfish to allow that because most people haven’t had the privileges I’ve had and I had been judging them  because of their smallness and that may be all they’ve got. Rather than judge them, I need to practice gratitude.  I’m so grateful we have such a forgiving God.  I would have dumped me a long time ago.  My assumptions on people have to go.  I’m a soul searcher by nature and need to remember most people either aren’t or don’t.

So, if being selfish is being defeated, then being defeated is being a victim.  Red flag!  To choose to be a victim is to spit in God’s face. Worrying is also selfish because it’s a form of control and control, or rather the illusion of it, is selfish.  I’ve noticed that most people don’t seem to realize that they “think” if they don’t worry about it, then it will happen.  Selfish, selfish, selfish.  We are not in control.  Hello. Spending half our time (or more) scaring ourselves to death is miserable and selfish.  It’s hard learning how to let go, but it’s the hard that makes it good.  Easy ends up hard.  Hard ends up easy.

Covetousness.  I have a relative who does this and it no longer irritates me because I feel sorry for him.  I’ve noticed whenever he wants something, he immediately thinks someone else wants to take it away from him.  Or, if he doesn’t get to the store fast, someone will buy the last one.  He often looks back and regrets things he sold (never, ever gave away) and wishes he had them back.  He won’t share either.  A lot of his precious “all subject to fire” things go to ruin too.  He’d rather allow that than share.  He seems to think that “someday” he’ll get to it. Well,  someday is a very dangerous word and he’s 75.  There probably isn’t a someday or at least not many of them.  Hello.  You cannot take anything with you.  Being selfish doesn’t create happiness, it creates inner turmoil and huge control issues.  I think I’ll give away something I like today.  LOL, but I’m serious.

Resentments are selfish too, especially if it involves not speaking to another family member.  If it’s safe to do so, be the bigger person and clean up your side of the street.  Make the amends.  If you dig deep, you’ll realize it’s fear, probably masked by pride, that keeps you from doing this.  If you don’t do it now, you may be doing it at the cemetery.  Most people think they’re making the other person pay, but I promise you, if you end up kneeling in the dirt crying over the flowers you just bought and put on the grave, you are the one who pays.

Not my biggest issue, but I’ve seen a lot of damage come from people not respecting what’s important to someone else, even if it seems lame.  I used to have a Jack Russell Terrorist.  She lived to be 19 years old.  She was almost blind and had doggie Alzheimer’s, but she was happy.  My “100 year-old dog” would walk around my fenced yard for hours and hours a day.  I would always make sure my gate was shut and locked.  I had a tenant who couldn’t understand why I wanted the gate locked and she wouldn’t let up about it. Realistically, it wasn’t necessary to lock the gate.  I doubted anyone would want to steal my 100 year-old dog and the gate was shut, but it made me feel better to have it locked.  At this point in my life, I was over people who didn’t have boundaries because they are so abusive so my tenant got an invitation to leave.  She was devastated.  After her “invitation”, she promised to lock the gate.  Of course she did–now it would serve her by letting her keep renting.  Too late.  I had learned a long time ago to look at people’s motives and exactly who their”promises” would serve.

I like that I keep discovering things about myself and about life.  I want to be the best person I can be which is the person I was created to be.  I have to continually work on ridding myself of selfish clutter that constantly accumulates in order to achieve this.  I cannot be defeated or I will not succeed.  I’m surprised it took me this long in my life to realize the starting point was looking at my selfishness.  Wow.  I wonder what will come up next.  I know I don’t have all the answers and that’s okay as long as I’m asking the right questions.  I know we never “arrive” and I’m good with that too as long as I’m going up.   I know there are times I’ll be going down and I can deal with that too as long I remember to maintain the necessary inner depth to be able to get out of it.