"O, beware...of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on." Othello, Act 3, Sc. 3.
It started off innocently enough. Cooking dinner at home one evening, I grabbed the barbecue spatula to flip the chicken breasts we had grilling when it struck me that my 19-year-old daughter has much better barbecue tools than I.
"Where'd you get these?" I had asked her when I was at her place.
"Oh, my boyfriend bought them for me," she said.
"Hmm," I reflected. "No one in my 48 years has ever thought to buy me barbecue tools like this."
After a while, I thought I had her shiny stainless-steel tongs and silicone-gripped fork out of mind, but every time I pick my tarnished and battered utensils at home, I wondered why it was that I had to work with second-rate equipment.
I deserve better, I thought.
Now, there are those who suggest that "guilt" and "fear" are the most destructive of emotions, but I take exception with that. These are the farm-league of bad emotions. It's what beginners worry about.
For those of us with lots of experience in emotional self-flagellation, it is at the altar of "envy" where we kneel and pray.
Yes, of course, we all have reason to fear or to feel guilt for misdeeds, but those are in the past tense. The mistakes have happened and we can't really change them.
We all know that it is through our mistakes that we learn. So although we may fear them and feel some guilt for making them, in time, they are just helping us improve. Really we should relish (barbecue pun intended) them and, in fact, embrace them.
Mistakes are simply the toll booth on the road to self-actualization. They are the price we have to pay, and, as we know, everything has a price.
Envy, though, is present and, worse still, future. It gnaws at our core and promises to feed on itself indefinitely.
It's no coincidence that two of the Ten Commandments warn against coveting. Eastern religions and philosophies, too, teach us to be content with our lives and with what we have.
Easy enough to say until you check out what your neighbour's got. And forget his wife, it's his carbon-fibre road bike that I truly desire (or his car, or his job, or his television. OK, dammit, sometimes his wife too!).
But what can be gained through this unfulfilled desire? Because even if I get the bike, car or television, I'll never be sated. Envy ensures that I will always desire something else
I'm trying to gain some wisdom from the 13th century Sufi mystic poet, Rumi when he says: "Fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion."
It's difficult, though, especially when I see my brother-in-law's new Weber grill.
"I wouldn't mind having one of those," I find myself thinking. "I wonder what kind of utensils he has."
