Frustration-page 31
Not Really Your Fault
Below is a reading from my book THE OTHER ROAD AHEAD followed by a comment inspired by the selection.👇
I just can’t get anything done today. I start a project only to find out that it cannot be finished until a correction that just showed up this morning is completed. Now I can’t find the file I was working on that had all the research for the other project which is in a hard copy that I now think got thrown out by mistake. This is a mess of Biblical proportions. This makes me insane. All the work is up in smoke and if I find out who is to blame I’ll destroy him!
It’s a “frustration-trap” like the Ozark Mountain Daredevils song Chicken Train1,(…can’t get on can’t get off…). An angry dilemma of, I can’t start and I can’t stop. By now burning with rage stuck in a place where nothing gets done but it seems that everything depends on me to accomplish something.
Frustration can derange me at times even if I try to apply logic. “First Things First”, as the slogan goes. But what’s the “first thing”? When the condition is bad enough my life suffers from it and so does everyone around me as if I am sinning against something and I’m being punished.
It seems I am already in a maze of cause and effect predicted by the iron laws of karma. Each frustrating moment is like a string of beads in an unbreakable chain of circumstances. Somehow my petty sins coagulate into a clot of problems which cannot be cleansed and healed. Has my history so weighed me down that I am assigned to row in the galley of my ancestors forever without the possibility of redemption? Trapped eternally in a labyrinth of words and meanings that have come down to me by guile and stealth.
The noted philosopher and lawyer Tertullian (d. 220 AD) was said to have authored the “Seven Cardinal Sins” which eventually (after the reign of Constantine the Great d. 337 AD) made their way into Imperial Roman theology. These transgressions were: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. Certainly an unpleasant menu of human behavior but he could have put frustration in that banquet and covered the subject on another more humane scale.
Although he was a faithful early proponent of a nascent Christian belief system2 but the lawyer in his training militated towards strict judgement as did his upbringing in a Roman Centurion household.3 Perhaps that is why frustration was not considered by this school of thought although it is as deadly to the spirit as any “sin”. As a condition it keeps people from seeing the larger picture in life. However, frustration, is not driven by urges purportedly hidden somewhere deep in the human mind that are subject to divine judgement.
Instead frustration is an existential part of the material world that cannot be avoided but can only be coped with. Other “sinful” character defects are products of choices. Frustration is no less harmful to us and our spiritual life within the human community but this is a strike against ourselves not a blot on a perceived eternal record.
There are those days when I am faced with the “Chicken Train” of uncertainty and frustration and I must be mindful that our world is designed with inherent problems that are built into our surroundings and relationships. The material world is infested with what are traditionally termed archons4 that favor an environment filled with disappointment and separation. Our world boils with obstacles created by the place where we live. This is a hard fact for me to get into my brain sometimes: frustration is baked into my cake.
Frustration is nothing to go crazy over or to be used as an excuse for unhealthy behavior that can do real damage to us. Nor is it a justification for hiding in an imaginary secure cage. Frustration is a demon of sorts and if it tries to take you over remember that it is a product of our world that we alone feed and can be defeated with a bit of perennial insight about our surroundings.
Roman Church dogma believes he was a defender of the Bible but it did not exist in his lifetime.
Better to be tired from life than tired of life.