When you point your finger, ’cause your plan fell through?
You got three long fingers pointing back at you.
— Dire Straits, “Solid Rock”
The Dire Straits song is from their album Making Movies…
I’d listen to it on cassette tape, over and over, in my high school bedroom…
Wishing the world would change, the people in my world would change.
As years passed, wishes turned to expectations…
Expectations are resentments under construction, as my 12-step sponsor likes to say.
When the world & people didn’t change to suit me, I exacted my revenge…
I drank and did drugs until there was no place left in the world for me!
(except homeless shelters, prison cells, psychiatric wards, etc…where I was headed)
Even after I got clean, I kept at the expectations; the world & people needed to change…
And you know what? Maybe they do!
Yet today, I do my best to understand…
When the time comes I’ve improved myself enough to suit myself…
(if the time comes)
Meaning: When I rid myself of resentments, stop judging others, shed my expectations?
When my actions reflect compassion and respect for others, at all times?
Maybe then I’ll be in a position to direct my attention to how the world & people need to change.
To use an analogy…
Imagine a room occupied in part by a giant stone.
People pass the stone and scowl at it, for whatever reasons.
(it blocks their path, they find it less than suitable, etc.)
I might condemn those people for their negativity…
(though they have every right to be negative, of course)
Or, I might take my hammer and the point of my chisel…
And sculpt the stone into something approaching an expression of art…
Causing the people to smile in wonder.
I am that stone!
It takes much more time and work to sculpt, than to condemn…
Yet a sculpture has the potential to last forever.
It’s easiest for me to point the finger of blame, when the world & people fail to change…
Yet it gets more and more difficult to ignore those three long fingers pointing back at me, when I fail to first improve myself.
In what ways are you tempted to expect others to change, and how to you instead improve yourself?
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