kentonwhitman.com

Genius. I have a genius idea. How about you do whatever I tell you? And we can start with this – whenever you’re hungry, don’t eat. And whenever you’re stuffed, eat another full meal.

What? That sounds stupid? Doesn’t make any sense? Why would you do such an idiotic thing?

Okay, how about this? How about you consider yourself a victim when what you’re actually doing is self-inflicting pain? You know, you could come home and say ‘work really stressed me out’. And then you can go and spend eight hours (or more) every day for the rest of the week (and the rest of the year, and the rest of the decade . . .) spending all your energy up-keeping this thing that causes you so much stress. Good idea!

Or perhaps we can get mad at all the food manufacturers and their slick ad campaigns for clogging our arteries by tempting us to buy donuts and triple-bacon mega-burgers with special sauce.

Or how about if we feel like we’re victims of time, because there is so much that we have to get done and just not enough time to do it! Never mind that we spend most of our waking hours in useless worry and self-inflicted frustration. Oh yeah. And watching TV.

Or maybe we can feel like society calls us ‘fat’, and then go buy fashion magazines which support that very stigma.

Now that we have you feeling victimized by all the things you control, let’s make you feel responsible for all the things you can’t control! This is only getting better and better!

We’ll call it guilt. Whenever other people over-react or become displeased with some situation you were involved in, just feel guilty. If you fail to correctly exercise your psychic abilities and make an error concerning some prediction, start feeling loads of guilt.

Maybe we accidentally break a dish at a friend’s house. Quick! Apologize and feel terrible!

Or maybe when we ask someone a question and they take it wrong, we can feel guilty.

Better yet, when we get cancer and are on our death bed, we can feel incredibly guilty about all the people we’re leaving behind. If only we could go on living so they wouldn’t have to lose us!

Great! Now you’re feeling helpless in the face of everything you control, and responsible for everything you don’t control!

While we’re at it, please send all your future paychecks to my personal address. And then, when your family is wandering homeless on the street, maybe you could just feel really, really guilty about that.

Yours in guilt-free bliss,

Kenton

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Zen Helpers. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.