The word "deserve" means what, exactly? To anticipate goodness coming your way? To feel as though you have earned something? To expect a return for effort, time, or deed? Grammatically, it puts a 'de' in front of 'serve' which takes away from the meaning of 'serve' and reverts it to... what? Does it Deconstruct? Demolish? Decommission? 'De' is often a negative affix, unless it's delightful or democratic - am I being conditionally biased here? Taking away from what it means to serve and internalising a desire for reward in its place (even with a modicum of indignation attached) seems to me a strange way to go about life, given that the universe appears inclined to deliver the unexpected.
There's a lot of talk about paying it forward, appreciation in advance of receipt, Laws of Attraction and karmic potential, all of which indicate some kind of baseline default system which we could translate as "we are what we think". The message seems to be that the more gratitude we harbour, the more will wing its way in our direction. But it's very hard to stay grateful for long when you're up against the pressures of difficult relationships, financial hardship, and emotional instability.
The way others behave towards us says a lot about them, and sure, we too can do things to serve or to sabotage our relations with people. Our actions speak volumes about us, and if we're lucky we get to learn from our mistakes. The catch, however, is that we don't get to see what we are doing ourselves nearly as clearly as we what's going on outside, so we miss a whole chunk of information on balance that could be important to our assessment of situations.
Does Deserving Serve Anyone?
Yes
No
Sometimes
Then there's the matter of how much we've put into something and how little seems to be coming out. It's very easy to focus on a particular aspect of life/work and see the grail as always being out of reach, even though change is happening all the time and Time itself is a fast-moving river. Plus, the currents of its course move in both (all, truth be told) directions, so although we only see the past, the future is equally valid in terms of What Is. Only, due to the nature of superposition, the options of What Is are many and varied (possibly infinitely so).
De-service sounds like a withdrawal of commitment, to me. "I've done all I can, now I de-serve." I doubt the universe holds a balance sheet on everyone but it does work with wave forms, physics tells us that. The little waves among the big ones sometimes get missed by the average observer - we're a little bit prone to seeing what we want to see, for better or worse. I'm glad of a beautiful dawn this morning and the fact that I managed to walk the dog while it was breaking. This appreciation sets me up with an advantage in the hours to come, and with luck will see me through the afternoon and evening so that I can count this one as a good day.
Every sunrise and sunset the sky is undeniably beautiful... unless swamped by clouds of grey. Beauty is a truth the planet dramatically delivers; do we deserve to see it? What were we put here for, after all?
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