Pondering Rhetorical Questions

I have written and rewritten this blog many times since I started composing it on Saturday afternoon, written both on my laptop and in my head. I don’t know why this week is so difficult, usually I sit down, start writing and when I’m done, I hit publish. I found this week to bring up lots of ideas and thoughts, examples from my own life on both sides of the issues; questions I couldn’t answer in the space of a blog.

I spent much of the last week asking myself the question: why do we feel the need to hack down people who are going after their dreams? I had kept my return to school fairly quite at work as I was still going to be working part time so I didn’t need a big hullabaloo about it. Inevitably the news leaked and the response from one of my co-workers was less than kind on three separate occasions; it got me to thinking about the question above.

I am not friends with this particular co-worker, I think that’s pretty plain, but we were cordial and I often defended this co-worker against a few who have set their minds to hating this co-worker come hell or high water, and I get repaid with a snarky comment about how long it’s been that this co-worker has heard me talking about returning to school it’s about time that I finally did it. If I had known that this was not the last such comment, I don’t know if I would have laughed it off so easily. After a conversation with another friend on Friday night about support, I really got to thinking about how we begrudge people their happiness. What is it about other people, sometimes even friends, achieving their dreams or going after their goals which brings out the worst in us all?

I spent much of my rewriting trying to answer this question, or at least pose a possible answer with some pithy statement but it never comes out sounding plausible. So I’m left with my unanswerable question to continue pondering on my own.