Wow! Two in one week! As if playing that other school’s fight song weren’t bad enough, I am now going to quote <deep breath> Hillary Clinton.
Speaking in an interview with Marie Claire magazine recently, [And NO, I don’t read Marie Claire! –R] Mrs. Clinton stated the following:
I can’t stand whining. I can’t stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they’re not happy with the choices they’ve made. You live in a time when there are endless choices. … Money certainly helps, and having that kind of financial privilege goes a long way, but you don’t even have to have money for it. But you have to work on yourself. … Do something!
This will probably never happen again, but I gotta say I agree with Hillary.
Here, she was speaking in reference to an article in the Atlantic written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former deputy of hers at the State Department. Mrs. Clinton was referring specifically to career choices in this interview, but the principle applies across all facets of life.
Choices come at us every day. Some of the choices we make turn out well, others not so much, but either way we’ve got to live with them. It may be that we can turn the bad into good, and good into better, but not without, as Mrs. Clinton says, working on yourself. The root of our problems is not circumstance, money or lack thereof, or what other people do or don’t do, the root is we ourselves.
Timidity, fear, small-mindedness, arrogance, laziness, lack of generosity in matters large and small, locks us into patterns of behavior that cascade into bad choices. Or else, these flaws in our character make us believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, breeding discontentment and eventually bitterness.
The solution is not to whine about not having what we think we want, but to stop and look in the mirror. What can I do to fix me? Answer that question, and the rest usually falls into place.
