So much goes on in our private lives when no one is watching or has any idea.
Among adults, both men and women, so much goes on in the heart and mind unaccounted for by others outside the man or woman. It has been said the biggest battles of our lives are fought within the silent chambers of our hearts. Often the heart-mind battle field is set up by ourselves sometimes through the unhealthy competition we have with other people. This, among other things, makes us feel less valuable in the social strata. We all at some point have a sense of bitterness, least-ness, inadequacy, a sense of imperfection, a sense of weakness, a sense of lack, and limitedness; and these thoughts and feelings weigh us down if we persist with them. With these negative feelings, we at the same time, on the one hand, have a sense of longing for one thing or another, a sense of becoming something, a sense of reaching some loftier sphere, on the other hand. It is also interesting to note that in the midst of these antithetical and degrading feelings of inadequacy, some people may still see in us greatness, strength, power, goodness, beauty because of what we are or have done, are doing and are capable of doing – they see excellence in us we don’t see in ourselves at that moment.
But any feeling of adequacy is a sign that we have abdicated the throne and took a slave’s place and permitted some faceless force, or emotion, to reign over us. In this darkness we often feel like giving up on life, we hate ourselves and envy others. We may even feel life has misplaced us or has betrayed us and allotted nothing or very little to us, whereas life does not give to any of us without our cooperation, we get from it precisely and proportionately equivalent to what we put out to life. These feelings somehow damn progress in our lives and bring about frustration. In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell, a great English philosopher, mathematician, wrote: “I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was: ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin’. In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoyed life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more … very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditation on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen.”
But how does one overcome this sort of nonsense which does not only diminish our self-worth, self-belief, self-concept, self-confidence, but may also make us ruin the good relationship we have with others? Bertrand Russell continues: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to be myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”
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