The Thinner Your Skin, The Larger Your Ego - Grasshopper

We all hold an image of who we are. What we don’t realize is that it’s a false god. Your image is not you_, no more than your breath is you_.  Both are byproducts of our human existence but they are not you.

People that are easily offended (thin skinned) have an image of themselves (ego) that doesn’t match up with reality. So every time they bump up against reality, their image gets bruised. This bruising has them feel under attack and they often go into defense mode - circling the wagons getting ready for a fight. It’s a fight for an illusion. When we do this, we make Don Quixote tilting at windmills look like he’s the poster child of sanity.

 

Reality will always offend you if you don’t recognize it as reality. Reality is going to happen independent of you, and if we take it personally, as an assault on our image, we’re in for a lifetime of battle.

 

If you use the word “fair” a lot, as in “that’s not fair,” you are steeped in ego and removed from reality. As far as I can tell the only accurate use of fair is in baseball, otherwise, as The Grasshopper said years ago, “Fair is a fairy tale.”

 

If you find yourself defending yourself, repeatedly, day after day and year after year, you may want to examine what you’re fighting for. What you’ll discover is that it’s a fake image that has no foot in reality and you’ve been fighting to preserve it. That’s a lot of wasted energy.

 

To put down your sword, it’s necessary to recognize that you are not the person you made up in your head. Once you begin to own that reality, fewer things will get under your skin and you’ll be less apt to fight to maintain your windmill of an image.

 

All the best,

John