So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back!
That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand;
This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.
Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down,
Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck
Of that proud man that did usurp his back?
Richard II
Act V, scene v.
A couple of days ago Kenneth Lay was laid to rest. Who was Mr Enron? Who knows or will ever want to know his rags to riches to ragtime life story?
Who knows how many good deeds he did, how many people he helped along the way? Right now, who cares? His life has been reduced to a brief slur. So much for one life.
Early this morning, my mother and I sat at the breakfast table discussing this and the other more mundane matters of our own routine little lives.
I told her about an individual am working with, how she seems hell bent on self destruction. I described how she has turned her life into an emotional roller coaster and how everyone around her has to go along for the ride on this free but very expensive, extensive, unnecessary distraction.
My mother smiled and said "You know, God is not such an idiot that he would go to every extreme to imbue me with such perfection and then leave the rest of humanity unfinished. Everyone thinks they are perfect and they are right. We were all made perfect at birth, but we go way out of our way to unhinge this perfection with our vanity and greed"
We are given everything we need to be healthy and successful. We undo our own perfection when we succumb to vanity and greed.
Greed binds us, blinds us, buries the treasure of our inner perfection, disconnects us from the design of our own beautiful simplicity and because of that we block each others greatness.
Vanity makes everything larger than it is. Every minor irritation matures into a sleepless night, every strange obsession melts into an addiction, every accusation spills over into a chemical imbalance, before we know it, we are buried in a mass grave of betrayal, divorce, murder and rape.
The excess of social upheaval and the manufactured nature of war is rooted in the ultimate seed of self destruction.
The seed is greed.
Once this seed is planted in the soil of vanity, from it grows the wicked invincible invisible weed that blocks out the light of our own wisdom, burns out the purity of our minds eye, stirs everything we touch into a torment and torments everyone we touch.
The ultimate vanity is the assumption that we alone hold the patent to truth. The ultimate greed is the assumption that we will or at least deserve to live forever. Was Kenny vain or greedy? I don't know, one thing for sure, like you and I, he was imperfect and awfully impermanent.
So that in venturing ill we leave to be
The things we are for that which we expect;
And this ambitious foul infirmity,
In having much, torments us with defect
Of that we have: so then we do neglect
The thing we have; and, all for want of wit,
Make something nothing by augmenting it.
The Rape of Lucrece 148-4
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