Be Careful of What You Wish For

I am currently reading this novel and a particular saying (among the characters in the story) keep coming up; "Be careful of what you wish for, you might just get it." Although that seems like a most contradictory statement but I wager that if you reflect on your own experience, you might just find a couple or even more instances when you have so fervently wished for something only to regret later when you got it.

I suppose there are two reasons why such a paradoxical situation might arise. The first is our limited knowledge of our own selves. It seems to me that though the sense of "self" resides in me, it is not inherently gifted with all the knowledge of the inner workings of my mind or my personality. In fact, self-knowledge has to be discovered through experience, much like how an infant learns about the way the world works by moving and experimenting with objects as well as people. Since our personality and our goals, desires and experience changes as we ages, I think there might never come a time when we would have perfect self-knowledge and infallibly make the right decision everytime and not regret the choice later.

The other reason is that when we want something, we always only focus on the good side of what we want and might fail to take into account other aspects of it. And of course too much of anything is generally not good and hence there is a saying to "get more than you bargain for." For those people who are religious and pray frequently, they have an answer related to why God don't answer people's prayers half the time. Because God would know you better than you yourself since He is Omniscent and when your prayers are not answered, it could be that He knows you are going to regret wishing for that later. Isn't this neat?