Ambition
Ambition corrodes the heart and clouds the sight. The ambition that wakes you up in the morning is the same one that does not let you sleep at night. Ambition never sleeps and it will hold on even a few months after your death. Ambition fills with emptiness ninety percent of human thoughts and communication. Ambition pushes you with incredible force to increase the balance in your bank account and to empty your wallet.
Ambition makes what is only useful seem indispensable and what is only superfluous seem necessary. Ambition does not converse, it confronts. Ambition gathers from reality only what can be used to accumulate wealth. Ambition depletes the imagination and feeds tension. Ambition always justifies itself, leads to violence, and indifference of the soul. Ambition spares neither the body, the mind, the heart, nor the soul.
Ambition is a sign of lack of self-confidence. It is a sign of distrust towards humanity. It is a sign of distrust towards God.
Ambition is the preferred movement of Lucifer. Vanity is his master stroke. Nothing works better to deceive a man, any man, than vanity.
God created everything for man to learn the saving, highest spiritual movement that exists: being thankful, giving glory, living gratitude for so much wonder and splendor. Satan instead instigates people to give glory to each other with the objective of taking it away from God, but especially to replace the propensity towards gratitude of the human heart with his favorite spiritual movement: vanity. Competition and ambition are the perfect banks for the river of vanity that corrodes, be it underground or not, the whole world.
Ambition can be overcome only by ceasing to judge and to confront one another, spending much time in silence conversing with God, praying, gratuitously donating your time, energy, and resources.
But above all, you win by continuously giving thanks to God, with great humility, for everything and anything, even the smallest act of our daily breath, the sprightly song of a blackbird, a sudden gust of wind. It is gratitude that in time becomes gratuitousness and service, humble devotion to others that holds at bay vanity and ambition.