Exodus 16:3 · World English Bible
and the children of Israel said to them, “We wish that we had died by Yahweh’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots, when we ate our fill of bread, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
Memory writes a standard the present cannot meet, and then an ordinary hard day starts to feel like murder. Slavery gets remembered by its meat pots, because a hunger happening now outranks a whip that has stopped.
From the Self-Help reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SELF-HELP
Memory writes a standard the present cannot meet, and then an ordinary hard day starts to feel like murder.
Slavery gets remembered by its meat pots, because a hunger happening now outranks a whip that has stopped. Measured against a remembered full table, a day's ration reads as a death sentence; measured against bondage, the same ration reads as the price of freedom.
The conditions held still between those two readings and the standard moved, which is where the whole of the agony was manufactured. The reading sets the despair, the despair sets the demand to go back, and a people whose blueprint points backward will ask for their chains every time the road gets thin, spending forty years to cross eleven days of ground.
Self-Help lens
What are you comparing today against, and did that comparison ever really happen?
Suffering comes from clinging, and nostalgia is clinging dressed up as memory. The remembered past is polished smooth, and the present is judged against a thing that never existed.
We suffer more in imagination than in reality. The mind borrows from the past and the future and makes the present pay for both.
The one who is content with enough is rich. Measure your bowl against someone else's table, or against yesterday's, and the same bowl becomes poverty.
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Self-Help