“Beauty will always give strength as long as envy doesn’t get in the way”, commented a good friend on an Instagram post.
I appreciated her thoughtful comment. She always has something positive to contribute. She made me think, though. Do I get jealous of other people’s success?
Have you known envy? Have you coveted thy neighbour’s wife (or huband) or thy neighbour’s goods?
My life has been rather busy, even tumultuous at times, so I cannot say I have envied someone else’s goodies, living or otherwise. I have certainly admired many houses, interiors, towns and travels, success stories and businesses, bodies and clothes, pinned them, reblogged or shared them, because I believe that what is good must be shared and propagated.
I am also blessed to have created many interiors for clients as well as for my family, written many articles that were applauded, created a successful interiors business (that got coveted by many, in good ways and otherwise…) and, god willing, I am about to create one more, this time from the deepest and brighter part of my soul.
There was, however, that one time when I coveted what I saw.
It was a Sunday and my mother and I had gone to church. Few steps ahead of us was standing my Girl Scout friend, Dawn, with her two sisters. They were standing Dalton-like, dressed in puff jackets in metallic colors, pink, dusty blue and silver (that was in the glorious 1980s). I grew up an only child of divorced parents, and the sight of those girls standing next to one another, with their mother and their father looking at each other across the male-female divide of my Greek Orthodox parish church, made me, well, jealous. I did not want the destruction of what I saw. I wanted it for myself. I wanted a family, and children, and a loving husband to look at across the church pews.
The years passed and I got my wish-in double portion!
I fell in love and got what I had coveted: a family of my own, with three children-in different hights, even today that they are young adults. Plus, seven years ago, I met my till then unknown half-siblings, two boys (or should I say men) younger than me. So, there is three of us, in different hights (I’m the petite) though we live in different parts of the globe. Couldn’t been more blessed, yes?
And yet… Life, as they say, we, I say, with our choices, most of the time based on ideas and behaviours that others have instilled and embeded on us, we turn down and we drift away from what we had coveted with all our heart’s ardour. Romantic love, even our children’s love change form, time and space get monstruous and we get into survival mode. And then… And then, where is what we have asked for in that early Sunday morning in church? Have we lost forever what we desired the most?
This past August, as I was lying in bed in hospital, I felt that I had to revisit my dreams. And you know what? My dreams that at one time had become my reality, revisited me, too. My kids brought me what provisions the hospital demanded, they called the doctors every day to ask how I was doing, they texted me with loving messages, my ex-husband was calling thrice per day, and my half-brother and his friends moved the heavens with his love and prayers. Will I get again what I have coveted and lost on the way? I think I may. And if God gives me a new lease, this time, I will get it right.