A Proportion Thing

I've seen it in others many times before. But this week I recognized it in myself. Pettiness can creep in unexpectedly and single-handedly ruin a perfectly good day. Pettiness takes the simplest of details and looks at it with the most selfish eyes. The problem is that selfishness blinds; it obstructs our view of what is good and lovely in life. Of course, love is blind too. But where love covers over a multitude of sins, pettiness takes the time to notice each one and take them all personally. What it doesn't bother to do is think rationally, which is the trickiness of it. The sordid stories one can conjure up in a sorry fit of pettiness seem so probable. But we all know how silly the sob stories of others can be. They often are so sad, and with good reason, if only what they believed were true. But most likely these sordid, silly, sad and sorry sob stories are so absurd that any sane and simple subject would surely see it. But we don't see it. All we see is ourselves, hurt, unloved, lonely, neglected. Someone who should have known better didn't treat us the way we wanted them to, the way we expected they would, the way we believed they should. And we feel it: misery. And it demands our full attention. We get so preoccupied with ourselves that we don't even think that there could be some other more hopeful and reasonable explanation. All we see is how we are being hurt. I saw this in myself today, but thankfully it went away when I chose to see it wasn't me who needed to have sympathy.