Humility - by Mbimenyuy Marius Kongnso

I read this great line in T.S Eliot play called the cocktail party and in it, this woman comes up to a psychiatrist and she says, you know I am really having a rough time, I am suffering badly, my life is not going well. I hope that there is something wrong with me and the psychiatrist says, what the hell do you mean by that? And then she says, this is how I look at it, it is either there is something wrong with the world and I’m just in it and that is how it is and I cannot do anything about that because it is the whole world or maybe i could be fortunate that there is something wrong with me that is causing all this unnecessary suffering and if I could just set it right, I could learn and I could just set my life straight. This got me thinking about that for a while now and I think well, if my life is not going the way I want, then I could find someone or something to blame, which is pretty convenient for me and relatively easier too or I could think, okay, I don’t like life, I don’t like the way my life is unfolding and maybe I don’t like life in general because it is tragic and tainted with evil. How do I know my judgement is accurate? And the question is, well, have I really done everything I possibly could do to set my life straight, because maybe I shouldn’t be judging it, it’s quality or the quality of life itself If I haven’t done everything I possibly could do to set my life straight. Then the virtue - Humility came in to my mind, a simple task. Humility is something that has taken me a long time to understand. Why is there a lot of religious injunctions supporting humility. To even really understand what the word really meant in that sort of technical sense and to me it means something like this, it means; what you don’t know is more important than what you know. When I understood this, what i don’t know started to be my friend. I used to be so defensive about what I know but the thing is, I really don’t know enough, and I could tell i don’t know enough because my life is not what it could be and neither is the life of the people around me. I just don’t know enough. And so what this means to me is that every time I encounter some evidence that I am ignorant, let’s say someone points it out to me, i would be happy about that. Then I’m like, oh you just told me how I’m wrong. It’s like great. Maybe I had to sift through a lot of nonsense to get to the real message that you are telling me now but if you could actually tell me some way that I’m wrong and then give me a hint about how to not be wrong, then I wouldn’t have to be wrong like that anymore. That would be a good thing. That was the moment I embarked on that adventure of listening to people and when I listen to people, they tell you amazing things and many of these things are little tools that I can put in your toolbox like Batman and then go out to the world and use those tools and i don’t have to fall blindly into a pit so soften. The humility element to me is, do I want to be right or do i want to be learning? It’s even deeper than that, it is, do I want to be a tyrannical king who’s already got everything figured out or do i want to be the continually self transforming fool who’s getting better all the time. And that’s actually a choice you know. It’s a deep choice and for me it’s better to be a continually self transforming fool who’s humble enough to make friends with what i don’t know and to listen when people talk and learn.

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