Dear Envy,

Your company, which I have suffered long, is disquieting, rude, and somehow more shaming. If Janus’ forward-looking face is Insecurity, you are always looking out behind. To glimpse you, I am ruined. Your face, your bombast, are that insidious.

Why should I waste so much time with you? Why should I let your direction confound and molest me? No. Not direction. You are the magician’s oldest trick. You, dear Envy, are misdirection. You send me looking in all the wrong places.

I walk through the park with you, Envy, my sick friend. The lovers on the blanket. See how they flaunt their epic love. The bench-sitting man with that gorgeous camera. He probably doesn’t even appreciate it. The family picnicking on the grass. See how they lounge, how they look at each other and smile, how gorgeously they get on. I wish I were a father with children. I wish I were a child with a father. Over here, the robust soccer boys focused in their game and in their camaraderie. They shine like heroes. I wish I were the least of them. And here, even, the pigeon alights and cuts through the sky. I wish I could fly.

See. All the wrong places. But what I understand, Dear Envy, is this: You are a mistake of vision, like farsightedness. You cause me to look out, around, and miss the middle. And miss me. The work of the compass, like the work of the clock, happens in the middle, but it’s the outside, the periphery that tells. My periphery, Envy’s ever-expanding eye, assails me, bombards me, with visions of success and beauty and glory. But it remains as I said: Envy’s vision is all wrong. Envy’s vision is an affliction. The work, the worth, is, as it was, in the middle. That is, in me.

Which is not the same thing as vanity or even solipsism. I don’t mean to suggest that. I just mean that Envy, at all the wrong times, causes me to look out first and then in. Envy’s vision, centripetal, is backward. If I look at me first, if I deal with me first, if I am satisfied with me first, I could not look out, look around, study the entire landscape of the seeming fabulous and the fortunate, and then feel, somehow, insufficient, imperfect, and I could not, would not, be wanting.

Of course Envy is a mistake, a misdirection, a miscalculation. Should the sapling envy the tallest oak? Should the moon, which, yes, might appear to have Envy’s cast of green, should the moon envy the sun?

Besides, I want to be me. I believe that you can’t start mucking with who you are at least by wishing things that are done were undone, or things that were undone could be done. When you start changing even the smallest thing the whole business might collapse, and while, yes, I sometimes forget it, I am happy to be me. I would rather be me than anybody. Not because I’m so great but because I own me, because I deserve to be exactly me.

I don’t need to be perfect. I can lose sometimes. I can be beaten sometimes. I can suffer sometimes. I can be made to wait sometimes. And, what’s more, I can be grateful too for all that I have, grateful too for all that I am. For it’s satisfaction, it’s contentment, it’s gratitude that will beat you away, Dear Envy.

SS