Can you name the Seven Deadly Sins? They are harder to remember than the Seven Dwarfs.

I will help you with the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. This list comes from Christian writers 1600 years ago. The Catholic Church helped spread the list.

Thinking about those sins leads me to conclude that I am a bad, bad boy. But let’s focus not on my failures but on the subject of pride. Why is feeling proud of one’s accomplishments a sin? Well, it may or may not be a sin.  

The sin of pride involves feeling excessively proud of oneself. How much pride is too much?

Here is something about which I feel proud: While traveling recently to Sydney, I arrived at a house that had been rented for my use. The gate to the grounds was locked, with a wall all round. The keys were in the wall mail box in a locked cylinder. The owner of the house had neglected to give me the code to open the cylinder. The cylinder had three wheels, each with six numbers on it. I calculated that the cylinder had 6 X 6 X 6 possible combinations. I started trying them systematically. 

After a few minutes I had gone through about 20% of the possibilities, but I succumbed to the nearly deadly sin of impatience. My new idea: Climb the wall surrounding the house and see if a door or window was unlocked. The front door was locked, but the back sliding door was not. Success! Solving the problem of house entry led me to feel proud. I am now writing about my triumph – is that excessive pride? I think not, but you can have your own opinion.

Individuals often feel proud about accomplishing something difficult for them. For instance, while working in a hospital, I noticed that psychiatrists took no pride in diagnosing a patient with a mental illness, but they felt proud when they identified a medical problem that was undetected by other specialists.

I once had an experience somewhat similar. When a huge hurricane struck Florida, I volunteered to go into the devastated area to provide emergency psychological treatment. It turned out that no one needed psychological help where I was sent. However, I overheard a person asking a nurse what to do about a sprained ankle. The nurse replied that she was not allowed to give medical advice. So I spoke up, advising RICE: Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate. The injured person, satisfied with my ideas, hobbled away. Then the nurse whispered to me: Perfect! I felt proud.

The opposite of being proud is being humble.  I wonder whether some people take pride in being humble. I laugh when I hear politicians say that they feel humbled by their election. I would feel elated.

I reckon that feeling proud of accomplishments helps provide a person with motivation to accomplish more in the future. In general, I am pro-pride. How about you? One final question: What accomplishments have led you to feel proud?

[Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash]