Elephants in the Living Room and Other Mysteries - Part Three
Well, hopefully some of you have begun to acknowledge the elephants (and rhinoceri) that you drag around and clean up after and have begun to pen them up, or better still, you have begun making arrangements to return them to the jungle where they belong. It may be helpful to your elephant herding efforts to look at some of the beliefs which make our living rooms such a happy breeding ground for secret elephants and rhinoceri. I think most of us live with a collection of irrational beliefs – I call it my Sin List – which cause us to live lives of quiet insanity.
A big thing that has helped me here in Arizona is the abundant availability of benches. Arizona is a user-friendly state, or at least the Mesa area, where I’m living, is. There are benches everywhere, so if I’m out with my niece and I start to get tired or panicky, I can go sit down and pull myself together. By and large, this was not a possibility in New York, so while being out with someone here in Arizona is helpful to me, in New York it actually increased my anxiety. I was terrified of humiliating myself and inconveniencing other people. In my lexicon of sins, inconveniencing others is definitely in the top ten, in fact as I made the list it turned out to be number three. So, without further preface, here is my sin list. I’m sure there are many variations, but it’s probably also pretty typical.
Sin #1: EXISTING. For a long time I felt like I was a mistake of classic proportions and that I was taking up space reserved for someone else. My need to constantly apologize was something of a joke among my friends. It was an automatic reflex and almost impossible for me to resist. If someone bumped into me on the street, I apologized. It was not their fault, you see. Since I had no right to exist, my presence in their path was an impropriety on my part. Had I not been there they would not have been able to bump into me. Oh, my.
Sin #2: BEING HUMAN, MAKING MISTAKES. This is particularly offensive behavior if you should not be alive in the first place. The more mistakes you make, the more likely God is to notice His/Her error and zap you good. It’s important to remember here that anything at all which makes other people – even one other person – unhappy, is a mistake. If something is not perfect it is a mistake, no matter how good or well done it may be. Being with other people is a constant effort to dodge the bullet. Any movement you make, anything you say is a mistake waiting to happen. And any mistake risks the exposure of Sin #1. Someone may notice that you are living a stolen existence. In addition, anything which makes even one person anywhere in the world unhappy is somehow a personal failure on your part.
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