“Live with humility, and find peace…” Thomas Merton.

Envy is not a trait people like to own up to, it has a bad name and unpleasant connotations.

But I have often felt envy in my life and it seems important to me to acknowledge it. I think being honest is even better than being perfect.  Because no human being is perfect, least of all me.

Tonight I was reading a beautifully written new book of short stories called Exhalation, by a brilliant author named Ted Chaing.

I loved every word of it, the book is so inventive, poignant, mystical and penetrating. I can’t wait to savor it and go back to it.

But halfway through the first chapter, I felt a sudden pang in my chest, which was not, I knew, a heart problem.

It was the sting of envy, which can be just as bad.  I don’t feel it too often, and it has an unpleasant, almost sickly feeling around it. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out what it was.

I don’t like to think of myself as an envious person, nobody does. I don’t live my life based on what others think of me, or on what others do or want.

I know now that life began for me when I stopped living my life based on what other people think of me or what other people do. That’s when real life began for me.

I am more self-aware these days, life does that if you can manage to live awhile,  and I wondered what it was about this book and this writer that made me envious. I read a lot of good books.

I knew I had to stop and consider it, face the truth about it. I didn’t have to think too long or too hard.

I thought that I have never written anything so beautiful and carefully crafted, I needed to come to terms that I was and am a good writer, but not nearly as good a writer as Chiang. It wasn’t that I never wrote anything as good, it was rather than I could not ever have written something as good.

I think I’ve just now been able to say that out loud, which is why it’s important to say it out loud.

I realize at this point in my life that I will never quite achieve what I wanted to achieve, and there is grace and reward in owning that and acknowledging it out loud. I also know I have achieved more than I ever thought I would achieve – love, living in nature, my blog, my photos, our animals.

I think if you have a big ego envy can just eat you up and devour your insides. I don’t have too big an ego any longer, I know better than to think too much of myself.

Was this burst of envy small of me? Did it say something about me that I ought to be ashamed of?

We are not supposed to admit to envy, it’s considered a character flaw, even a sin in some religions.

But I am beginning to be older, and I need to face the truth of myself. It is both healing and nourishing. And about time.

There is more to life than being brilliant, or as talented as someone else.

There is more to life than I have experienced, or what I am experiencing right now.

I feel as if I have found myself as a writer on the blog. I will not win great awards or fame for my work here, the literati culture will not single me out for praise, there is no McCarther genius award down the line for me, no more best sellers or Nobel Prize or fancy book tours.

I don’t covet or want any of those things, oddly enough.

But I do wish to be honest. I would very much have loved to be as good a writer as someone like Ted Chiang. I won’t wish him any bad luck or ill will, I wouldn’t take his success from him or deny it from him for anything.

But I think I’m learning that being a saint is not about being perfect, it’s much more about how one handles being less than perfect.

I have always wanted to know who I really am, not for others but for me.

And I know there’s no value in pretending to be or wishing to be something I’m not. I’ll never know who I am that way. I am learning what I can do, and I am learning what I can’t do.

“I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my whims and fancies,” wrote Merton. “I cannot make even my own body obey me.”

Amen to that. Pride makes us false, humility makes us real.

I’d so love to write as well as Ted Chiang, but by trying to understand my envy I realize that I want something else much more. I want to become a whole human being.

And whole human beings feel envy. I don’t need to be coddled or told that I’m a wonderful writer. I’m not looking for that. I need to know who I truly am so that I can discover what I really want.

It is almost impossible, Merton wrote, to overestimate the value of true humility and it’s power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy.

Because I am older, I am free. Because I can see what I never was able to do, I am free to do what I want to do. Merton believed that humility in itself contains the answer to all of the great problems of the soul.

We’ll see, I’m not there yet.

And truthfully, I have no desire to be Ted Chiang. I would not trade places for him or anyone else on the earth. And perhaps that’s the real lesson of envy, and it’s sting if I de-construct it.

Envy is the opposite of humility.

It’s okay to want to be better. It’s better to be me. I’m enough.