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"How stupid of me to do that?!"
I am sure we all have some thoughts or certain variation of that before. We are always focused on what we have done wrong rather than what we have done well. We look at our insecurities and blind ourselves from the strength.
This always happens to me. For example, when I am meeting with some friends. I will be making some jokes and having a great conversation when I just made a stupid lame joke that no one gets. After that I will be thinking of how stupid and lame of me to say that and bring the whole mood down.
I was reading a book "Who ordered This Truckload of Dung?" by Ajahn Brahm (which I highly recommend) who is a monk and he told about his story about a similar case. The story goes like this.
He was building a monastery where he had to prepare the foundations, lay concrete and bricks, erect the roof and put in the plumbing. He was a physicist and a high school teacher with no experience in construction or laying bricks.
Laying bricks seems much easier than done. He will be laying bricks and tapping to one corner to make it level when another corner would go up. So he'd tap the other corner and the brick will move out of line. He will be juggling back and forth just to make sure it is properly aligned.
Since he is a monk, he have lots of patience and make sure that every brick was perfect, no matter how long it took. Eventually, he completed the first brick wall and start admiring at his accomplishments. It was then he noticed two bricks that were slightly inclined at an angle. All the other bricks were nicely in line, except for these two bricks. They looked horrible and spoiled the whole wall.
By then, the cement has hardened and was too hard to be taken out or ammend it. So he asked the abbot (senior monk) to knock down the wall and start over again (he has a lot of patient). The abbot said no, the wall had to stay.
The monastery eventually was completed and visitors start coming in where he will be showing the visitors around the monastery but always try to avoid taking them past the brick wall with 2 misaligned bricks.
One day, one of the visitors was the wall and commented.
"That's a nice wall."
"Sir, have you left your glasses in your car? Can't you see those two bad bricks which spoil the whole wall?" he responded.
What he said next changed his whole view of the wall and himself.
"Yes. I can see the two bad bricks. But I can see the 998 good bricks as well."
He was stunned. And for the first time he could see the other bricks in the wall apart from the two bricks.
The bricks on the left and the right of the bad bricks were good perfect bricks. More importantly, the perfect bricks were many more than the two bad bricks.
Previously, he would only focus exclusively on the two mistakes and was blinded to everything else. That is why he couldn't bear looking at that wall or having others to see and wanted to destroy it.
Now that he can see the good bricks, the wall didn't look so bad after all. Infact, he have forgotten exactly where those bad bricks are a few years later.
This is so true among everyone of us. We all have insecurities. The two bad bricks that we are embarrassed to show and would like to destroy, that is hindering us from seeing the other good bricks within us.Our insecurities have limit our sense of worth and tunnel visioned us away from the many more strengths that we have but are unable to realise.
We also assume that the way how you have perceived your insecurities are the same as how others have perceive you. The truth is their non-biased eyes gave a clearer picture of ourselves than we do. And it is that clarity that we must seek to trully understand our true sense of worth and look at the whole brick wall rather than just the two bad bricks.
Once we look at the bigger picture of ourselves, we will realised that our two bad bricks is nothing compared to the other perfect bricks that we have. Only then we could be at peace at ourselves, accepting of the two bad bricks and enjoy living to the fullest.
Ajahn Brahm (the author of the book), once told the story to a builder and the builder told him a secret.
"We builders always make mistakes. But we tell our clients that it is 'an original feature' with no other house in the neighborhood like it and charge them a couple of thousand dollars extra!", he said.
So the 'two bad bricks" that we thought might be weighing us down, might be very reason that make you more unique.
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