What Earth teaches me about Self-Esteem!

Asking you to own up and appreciate your uniqueness can sound like a pious platitude or a psychological ploy to assuage the anxiety you feel about being so small and insignificant in a vast universe.

When you are told not to compare yourself to others, you are less inclined to listen, because when you look around, all you see is inequality. Unequal on so many levels: size, shape, color, health, wealth, looks, education, fortunes, religion, belief systems, etc.

But all these differences are external. There is always somebody ahead of you and somebody behind you in all those attributes and measures.

There is always somebody in the world who is better looking than you, but there is also somebody who is less attractive than you.

There is somebody who is taller, but also somebody who is shorter.

There is somebody with more money, but also somebody with less.

The list is endless. But there is no one like you in the whole world. So, stop comparing yourself to others. It is an exercise in futility that will end up in frustration.

On the level of our humanity, all of us are equal, special, and unique.

If you can learn that lesson once and for all, you can get rid of feelings of envy and jealousy which plague so many people. You can get rid of 4 of the 7 deadly sins or Capital Sins as the Catholic Church calls them. You can instantly get rid of pride, envy, anger, and greed. The other 3 are lust, gluttony, and sloth.

This is a lesson Earth can teach us. To understand this lesson, think of the shape of the planet. God created it in round shape rather than square or triangular shape for a reason. There is a lesson in that.

Think of a Ferris Wheel at a carnival. There are ten buckets on the wheel and there are two people in each bucket. Jim and Jane, who just started the ride, look up and see Sam and Sue sitting in the top bucket. Jim and Jane feel inferior to and jealous about the superior position of the couple above, only to realize in the next minute, they are on the top and Sam and Sue are at the bottom. While enjoying the exhilaration of being on top, Jim and Jane also begin to feel the loss of their peak experience as the wheel continues to turn.

Regarding positions and possessions, you will always be inferior to some and superior to others. But on the level of the soul, words like superior and inferior don’t matter.

True humility and true self-esteem are based on that awareness. The circular nature of the Ferris Wheel reminds us that there is really no one who is above us or beneath us, in front of us or behind us, but we are all in this together. Chelan Harkin says it poetically:

Darling, bottom line,

we’re all beautifully

animated dust

and to make any kind of hierarchy

comparing dust to dust

seems rather silly,

does it not?

(From Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a Heavenly Life)