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Step 6: When you improve, four things improve: T, O, D, and O
The 88 rungs of happy people
In this chapter of “The 88 Steps of Happy People” I invite you to heal your wounds before blaming everything else for your misery.
Many years ago there lived in a kingdom in the Far East a teenager named Veronica, who was the daughter of a shoemaker. One day, running through the field, he made a small but deep wound on the foot, just below the right ankle, which took a long time to heal and which Veronica did not notice. The same night that the injury occurred, the kingdom festivities took place, and she was very excited to attend the popular dance in the town square in her best attire. She put on her dress and ran to try on her blue high-heeled shoes. He had been imagining them for days.
When he tried them on, he saw that they hurt him a lot, so he went to his father’s workshop and with a hammer hit the inside of the shoe where it coincided with the point below the right ankle. As much as he hit and deformed it, every time he tried it on, the shoe kept hurting him. He cursed the shoe and discarded it. He took the next pair and repeated the exact same process. Then another and another. He concluded that all shoes were poorly made for his foot. She remained convinced of it until the day she recognized that she had a wound below her ankle. He cured her and as if by magic, suddenly no shoe hurt her.
A few years later, when she was eighteen, Verónica met her first boyfriend, Arturo. They both loved each other very much, but she had a inordinate temperament. From time to time she was unable to control her character and would scream and attack Arturo in order for him to change his way of acting and adapt to her criteria. During one of these violent upheavals, Arturo felt something break inside him and that he could not continue the relationship. Veronica wept inconsolably and came to the conclusion that Arturo had a personality incompatible with hers. “I have to find the right man for me,” she grumbled with conviction. The second boyfriend arrived, then the third, the fourth and even the tenth. The episode was repeated with all of them, and each of the relationships failed. “All men are equal,” he concluded.
One day he remembered his blue shoe. He remembered the dozens of pairs of shoes he cursed and threw away. He recalled his conclusion that all the shoes were badly made. He remembered the day he recognized that he had a foot injury and that the problem was not caused by the shoes, but by his injury. That day his eyes were opened. I can’t believe it, he told himself. I have acted with my boyfriends the same as with my shoes. I have hit them with my temper just like I hit my shoes with my hammer, not realizing that the problem in the relationship was not caused by themIt was me, just as the pain in my foot was not caused by the shoe, but by my wound ».
That day he began to work to heal the parts of his personality that were not healthy or in balance. He stopped launching attacks like hammer blows to try to change others, as when he hit the inside of shoes to mold them. He stopped discarding people as inappropriate, just as he learned in his day to stop discarding shoes. And what happened? She ended up falling in love with the first boyfriend she had after that apprenticeship. Not because he was perfect, but because she healed his wounds.
# 88StepsPeopleHappy
“Never judge from the outside what you can never know inside” @ Anxo
If you have seen value in this Step 6, I invite you to photograph it and share it.