On Pride and its Place.

The biggest failures I have ever seen and experienced have always come about because someone could not let go of their pride. What's is its purpose? Where does pride really belong, if anywhere? It's good when we are proud of ourselves - our accomplishments, our acquisitions - right? But why does this even have an impact on the parts of our lives that have to do with other people?

***
Pride is what keeps a father and son from talking for 10 years or so because they argued and no one wants to say sorry, even when the son might be in danger of his life, unbeknownst to the father. The father's pride is so important that he doesn't even know that it has taken precedence over his interest in his son's life.

Pride is what keeps her from telling him she loves and misses him even though she already agreed that they should "see" other people while he works abroad. She doesn't want to look like a fool, she wants him to come to her on his own. All the while, he dates foreign girls and tells her all about it.

Pride is why it took him two years to admit that he was wrong for what he did to her and ask her for another chance - but much too late. Pride took precedence over his love for her, until the time when it didn't - and she had already let go of her love for him.

Pride is what kept the child of a mother starving to the point she became sickly, because the mother could not face up to her financial difficulties and ask for public assistance. She was raised to do it on her own. Pride was more important until the child nearly died.

Pride is what kept him unemployed for an entire year, wracked in debt. Pride in his master's degree took precedence over lower level jobs until he almost lost it all. His degree could not sustain food, water and shelter on its own.

Pride is what has kept a whole race/class of people down, because looking at themselves as at least a part of their problems would mean letting go of the pride attached to overcoming. They got too comfortable blaming someone else.

***
Pride, defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary as the consciousness of one's own dignity: is it a building block of the persona, or a brick wall to accessing the truly important things in our lives? Or both?
Should we even have any "pride" in or accomplishments and acquisitions? How important are they really in the scope of who we are?
If the things in which we take pride were to fall away - do we cease to exist?
I search for answers, because all around me there is suffering, and I find that the suffering would either cease to exist or at least remain undisturbed if someone (or many people's) pride were to crumble and fall.

***
I write this, not supposing that everything in our world must have utility, but with the belief that everything has its place. So really, what I need to know is why do we have pride, and what is it's proper place?

Consider it.

Realization.

It happened in the shower. I had commenced with my weekly shampoo and conditioner ritual - lather, rinse, lather, detangle, rinse, condition, rinse. For some reason, I felt the need to break away from the mundane after I detangled. I stood there, and instead of going for the conditioner, I went for my hair.

I didn't just touch it - I touch my hair all the time - but I felt it. I felt its softness. I felt its strength. I felt its bumpy nature. It was calming - comforting even. I felt it with my hands - and then I brought the ends of my hair around to my face and nuzzled my nose in it. I smelled the clean, sweet smell of my shampoo, felt the smooth, hard and thick nature of my individual hair strands as they tickled my nose.

It then dawned on me why people are always so fascinated with my hair. Even women who have similar hair to me - who wear their hair in a similar way - they just seem fascinated with it. I've always loved my hair - but simply because it was mine. Each hair on my head, each curl and wave and kink, was God given. Why not love it? But now I understood the fascination - why people always want to reach out and touch it - why every man who has ever touched or nuzzled his nose in my hair has been turned on by it.

The realization: it may just be hair, but my hair is just sexy.

Conditioning my hair never felt so good.