Questions of Jealousy

I found myself longing for an old friendship that I had left behind. We were friends long ago and drifted off, mostly because I wanted to. Recent occurrences in life reminded me of it and I realized she was still hanging out with our mutual friend from the same era.

I was swept up by jealousy of them still being friends. Being there for each other the way we had been. Just without me. I started questioning my choices and tried to remember why we weren’t friends anymore. Why wasn’t I there with them?

As I went through it in my head – and in their social media feeds – I came to realize that what I was longing for didn’t exist. In theory I wanted to be friends like we used to but I didn’t want to pay the price of it. I didn’t want their lives. I didn’t want to live where they lived, do what they were doing, own what they had. We had grown apart and for good reasons.

There’s nothing wrong with jealousy.

It can work as a compass showing directions we could take in life and bring up hopes and dreams we didn’t know were there. Being jealous of someone can hold the keys to our happiness. Where it seems to go off the rails is when we don’t look at the big picture.

There is this riddle I love to ask people when talking about different life paths and choices:

I draw a line on the board and ask you to make it shorter without touching it. What do you do? 

The answer is that you draw a longer line next to it. 

You can make my choices seem poor by showing the choices you’ve made. The trick is, they only seem better. My line didn’t get any shorter, it just looks like it because your line is longer. And as we haven’t agreed whether a short or a long line was better, they’re actually just different. 

For a moment, someone else’s life might seem better, but having a closer look can help realize it’s not what one really wants – and frankly, if it is, again, as Grandmother Willow says:

“You know your path, child, now follow it.

xx