When I was seven years old my brother and I spent occasional weekends at our paternal grandmother’s house. We loved visiting because she baked cookies and pies for us and let us eat as much as we wanted.
She also taught us to play poker for quarters. Our mother was poor, so a pile of shiny quarters felt like striking gold. We got to keep every coin we won and spend it on candy and small toys at the corner store. I still remember the sting of holding a terrible hand when the stakes felt huge. Grandma always tried to let us win, but sometimes the cards simply wouldn’t cooperate.
One day I came home from school sobbing because a wealthy classmate named Aaron had mocked my homemade clothes. I was convinced he had everything while I had nothing: married parents, nice clothes, a shiny Mongoose bike. All I had were hand-sewn outfits and no bike at all. My mother dried my tears and then gave me one of the most helpful lessons I’ve ever received about jealousy. She said, “Ronda, it’s okay to feel jealous—everyone does. But jealousy is built on a lie. It assumes you can see someone else’s entire hand of cards when you can only see what they let you see.“Just like when you play poker with Grandma, you might feel jealous of her chips, but you can’t see her cards. You don’t know if she’s holding a royal flush or a complete bust. You can’t pick and choose—you’d have to take her whole hand, the good cards and the bad ones hiding underneath. “That simple image has stayed with me for decades. Today, when jealousy creeps in, I remind myself of the blessings in my own life, and I notice that by focusing my thoughts on gratitude, covetous feelings fade and disappear. The truth is that we don’t know what others are going through. Someone may have hundreds of millions of dollars and look perfect on the outside, while privately grieving a sick child or a broken marriage.
Jealousy and coveting inherently dismiss the joy we can find when we refocus on our own gifts. Feelings of wanting what another person has lead us into misery. Someone will always have an easier, more successful life than we have. Someone is always thinner (if that’s your thing), richer, has fancier stuff or a social-media-perfect life.
Jealousy is a normal human emotion, and it’s okay. Still, indulging in feelings that make us ungrateful and miserable are unfruitful.
Neuroplasticity (the brain can change and our thought processes can change) research shows the more we focus on joy, the more our minds will find things to be joyful about. Meaning, we can train our brains to focus on the blessings in our lives and feel more gratitude and less jealousy, and conversely, the more we focus on the painful things that happen throughout the day, the more our minds will look for pain.
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