prIde vs hUmbleness

Take note of the prominent "I" 

Sometimes when I get thinking I can't stop myself like today's Thoughtful/Thankful Thursday. Actually this idea popped into my mind a few days ago and I thought (ya, yet again) it would make an interesting topic for a Thursday. It's turning out to be much more of a involved topic than I had anticipated...lots of meat on the bone here.  As you can probably guess I'm talking about pride/proud and how, perhaps, it's not the greatest

It's a thought :)

 feeling we should have.  Now my blog is a happy place and I'm not trying to be a "downer" or anything but, after all, it is my day to think!  

Okay, I was thinking of the phrase captioned in the cartoon to the right then started to wonder why we throw the "pride" and "proud" adjectives around if that Proverb (16:18 to be exact) is true.  My brain gears continued to burn so I did some research and trying to be concise as I can, here it goes.  You can check out the definition of "pride" here...

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pride

and you'll discover that it seems more self-centered in it's meaning as visually presented in the first box above, emphasizing the "I". Now, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't feel good about ourselves or when our loved ones do well, just that perhaps we shouldn't get a feeling of superiority that elevates us above "those others".  In fact, in my searchings I found that one of the things you should never say to your child is "I'm proud of you", which sounds odd at first until you ingest the idea behind the concept.  Dr. Carl Pickhardt explains that it makes your child feel responsible for your parental pride (and there is that "I" again) and that the emphasis should be on the child, saying instead "Good for you!" which makes total sense to me.  Here's the link to check it out...

://www.care.com/a/19-things-you-should-never-say-to-kids-1307261344  

It's not easy being green :)

I think humbleness, which is the flip-side of pride, gets a bad rap in our society in general.  I suppose it's because of the "lowering" connotation the word evokes. But if you follow that thought through, if we all humbled ourselves, we'd all be on the same level together which is a nice idea. It's really a quality to strive for as it makes us think more of others and if everyone did that, everyone would be thought about!  What a great thought to think, in my humble opinion :)

So lets try and avoid the road of prIde and go for the hUmble route. It's a much nicer drive for both U and I :)