UgBlogWeek Day 1 – Pride

The #UgBlogWeek begins today and for seven days I will be joining the rest of the Ugandan Blogging community in sharing a blog each day. I will personally be focusing on the seven deadly sins i.e Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Wrath, Sloth and Gluttony; one for each of the seven days.

We kickstart the series with the mother of them all – Pride!

Pride is one of the strangest human emotions. As an older member of the family of the seven deadly sins, there is a general feeling that pride is one of the more profound and greatly impacting emotions human beings feel. If pride were a woman, she would be that gorgeous woman with a twin sister who is just as gorgeous but with an attitude that is completely opposite to her sister’s.

The strangeness in pride is that it comes in two packages. One package is neatly tied up and properly covered in a flowery paper bag with a tiny little ribbon knotted by angels. This sister is the one that we would all love to feel once in a while. This pride is the one that parents feel for their children. The one a single mother feels when she works extra hard to put food on her little table that holds her little boy and herself. The pride she feels when the little boy comes first in class or wakes up on Saturday morning to tell his mummy that he would like to help her do the dishes.

The feeling created by this pride is quite warm and genial. It can give one the convivial feeling of comfort, joy and pleasure. It is that little emotion that engulfs you when your dad introduces you to his friends as his favorite son or when your mother tells you she really misses you and would like to have lunch with you. This nature of pride is very easily attained from the actions and choices that we make in life and we are glad to stand by them.

This kind of pride is the one a Ugandan feels when they are stuck at the Airport in Moscow and then they bump into a stranger who offers them a place to rest their head, food and vodka; and then it turns out that this stranger is Ugandan too. The kind of pride you feel when Uganda’s Gazelles beat South Africa in the Afrobasket Women in Yaounde Cameroon.

This kind of pride has a very strange way of putting a smile on your face. It gives you a sense of belonging and makes you smile with untold cheer and optimism.

Photo Credit : http://joeysylvester.com/

Then there is the twin sister of Pride. She has a very close relationship with arrogance and boastfulness. She usually veers her head when one gets swallowed up in self importance. Great brains like Aristotle and George Bernard Shaw have often looked at Pride as a virtue. I highly doubt they were referring to this twin right here.

The extreme and inordinate self esteem that this twin sister is defined by is one what often engulfs even the littlest of human beings. If given as much as an inch, she can take up an entire mile in your life. The biggest challenge with this twin sister is that while she can be a great motivator for one to work hard and stay at the top of their game, she is also very often a reason for the downfall of many a man. Modesty and humility have clashed with her more times than God and the Devil have clashed. She is quite smart and tactful and will easily convince you that she is well-intentioned.

She is so smart and dangerous that she often overpowers her meek and humble twin sister. For this reason alone, she is remembered more as a sin than as a great virtue. And thus pride is one of the seven cardinal sins. Brainy philosophers and folks fronting the classical Christian theology school of thought have mentioned pride as the primary and most dangerous human problem.

However, in the early stages of the 20th century, “humanistic psychology” seemed to realize that the biggest and most primary human problem is actually not pride but  rather low self-esteem which rises from a shortage of belief in one’s “true worth.”. Carl Ransom Rogers the American psychologist states that many people “regard themselves as worthless and unlovable” and therefore lack self-esteem.

The irony of someone lacking self esteem turning out to be the most proud individual can never be lost on anyone.

This challenge for anyone is to know which of the two sisters they are harboring inside of them. For every action and choice, one should stop to think about which of the two sisters is getting her skin oiled and her feet washed with warm water.

The two sisters are very much alike it takes a very brilliant individual to tell the difference and thus nurse and house the right sister.

Bernard
a.k.a Beewol
The Talkative Rocker
Follow @beewol on Twitter

Related Posts

• 

  A Blindman’s Painting
  A Blindman’s Painting
• 

  Loki, I made it!
  Loki, I made it!
• 

  A Tale of Chicken
  A Tale of Chicken
• 

  Lockdown Silver Linings
  Lockdown Silver Linings