Humility is a dish best served cold. It comes without regard to any pain you feel, any morals you subscribe to, any addictions you wish to withdraw from. Humility is pain. It pursues any thought you have, any feeling you experience, any action you undertake. Humility is the most abhorrent enemy of pride.
To understand humility, we must address pride, because humility pursues pride at every turn. Pride permeates everything you experience in life. Pride is everywhere in your thoughts, it spreads throughout your feelings, it invades every action you undertake. Pride surrounds you at every footstep. It is no joke because it is a fiercesome enemy. It causes you to make irrational decisions; to choose what is ultimately devastating over what is beneficial. Pride will cause you to lie because you think it is for your best. Pride will cause you to become a slave to that which should be your slave. Pride is ultimately your master, unless you master it and everything it commands.
Humility demands a mastery of self while pride demands a slavery of self to everything. This is the battle which I now see myself in. I feel myself helpless; merely observing everything I can take place. The most vicious of attacks remains this: that I remain hopeless. Pride launches this attack on humility, which humility partially succumbs to. The lie of pride tries to hide the fact that humility does not fully submit to hopelessness. Rather, humility requires partial hopelessness in order to come face to face of what is better.
If it helps, picture this: I am lying still at the bottom of a bottle looking up. I see above me what appears to be stars and time passing. When I look to my left, I see my past through the glass that provides me with an image of failure and guilt. When I look to my right, I see through the glass my future as a one looking through a peephole from the outside, magnifying every failure and guilt from the past and present as a future abomination to remain in my life. To what do we owe this distorted view of past, present, and future? No less than pride. And what will cure it? No less than the sheer abhorrent pain of humility.
