Experiencing Jealousy
You are out having a great time when suddenly your smile begins to fade, your muscles get tight, and you are tense all over. Just that quick, a perfectly careless moment, takes on a completely different texture. An intricate tangle of feelings and emotions begin to intertwine deep within you. It feels like your heart and soul have been drawn into a rigid, unyielding, knot in the pit of your stomach.
You aren’t dying, you only feel like you are. You are experiencing an acute jealous moment. Relax, it’s a perfectly normal emotion, and it usually passes pretty quickly. It happens to the best of us. Anybody who says they never have them, is either out of touch with their emotions, or not being completely honest.
These are small, but significant wrinkles in time, so it’s important to understand why a perfectly calm, secure, good natured person could feel this way. One of the most common instigators is the absurdly hot girl or guy, that everybody wants to be with, or wants to look like. Or the co-worker who always seems to be a few steps ahead of everybody else. And everybody has a friendly neighbor with the, Better Homes and Gardens, yard. Sometimes none of these things will cause that familiar pang of jealousy. It just depends on a person’s state of mind and the situation. Of course a really insecure person can get jealous of just about anything. That is not normal or healthy, and needs to be looked into.
Having a bad day, or even a bad week, can set this emotion off. Whatever the reason this phenomenon takes place, it can be handled with grace until the urgency of the moment passes. Taking deep slow breaths and re-focusing our energy is very helpful.
Every day, relationships are destroyed because of irrational jealousy or insecurity. The victim who forfeits their control, to the coveting of others, loses sight of themselves, and is blinded by the light of another.
Each time this feeling is allowed to get a good workout, the control over our healthy thoughts gets weaker. There are people who are willing to go to any lengths to have what they see others having. Living like this brings only temporary satisfaction. The degrees of jealousy can vary from benign, to outright irrational and outrageous. Out of control jealousy can lead to stalking or worse. Some people adopt that old saying “the grass is always greener on the other side” as their mission statement. Not a good idea.
It is wise to remember that there will always be somebody who is better at something, or has more of something, than we do. There is no way to be the best at everything, all the time. Everybody has there bad days and their good days. There is no reason to feel threatened by somebody else’s light. Be happy for it, as it may light your way one day. We all have our own light that gets as bright as we let it, if we let it.
There is a saying that could qualify as words to live by. “When the grass looks greener on he other side of the fence, start watering yours more.”