Imagine a suburban neighborhood, abundant in brilliantly flowering gardens and displaying an overall sense of tranquility and composure. Amidst the rows of friendly-looking houses you will find busy landscapers, tending to their homes’ gardens. As in all other aspects of life, amongst the gardeners there are some who are exemplary; likewise, there are some who are particularly incompetent. The exemplary are initially filled with fulfillment, joy and satisfaction. However, the severe contrast in aptitude between individuals is occasionally matched with harsh feelings of envy, odium, and covetousness by the inept towards those who experience success in their endeavors.
In gardening, success is often measured in the beauty and size of the flowers cultivated. Oftentimes, the secret to success lies in the way the gardeners grow their flowers.

Some gardeners seek out the goodness and beauty in everything by nurturing the virtuous assets and pruning out the bad. Soon, the pious qualities exceed the already-weakened bad ones, leaving beautiful flowers comprised of love and happiness and serenity. These gardeners supervise the most beautiful of the gardens, as they tend their gardens from the inside out, allowing nothing bad to surface. This is considered an exemplary gardener. Such highly honorable categorization is rarely achieved, as it requires the most genuine of motives. Exemplary gardens are respectably beautiful, and the gardeners themselves are admirable in all respects.

When a garden is as lovely as these, onlookers fall into three categories. The first is of those who respectfully admire the exemplary gardens while still nurturing their own, aiming that they may also have an orchard equally rich in prosperity and splendor. These gardeners can be called content.  The second category is the covetous, comprised of those who spend so much time wishing their garden was as picturesque as the exemplary garden that they neglect their duty of tending to the needs of their own garden, weeds eventually overrunning the once-beautiful landscape. A small amount of gardeners, understandably called the odious, are still worse off, their gardens drowning in weeds.  As a result, they are filled with animosity towards the seemingly effortless beauty of exemplary gardens. They feel that the only way to make things fair amongst the gardeners is to attempt to destroy the most beautiful of the estates. What such vandals fail to realize is that their endeavors only result in the overall degradation of the of the entire neighborhood’s quality, not at all raising the individual eminence of their own garden. 

Often, exemplary gardeners feel inclined to help those deep in their odious ways, lending assistance to the garden, attempting to suppress weeds and beautify the residuum of good flowers. The odious gardeners, however, often use this as their opportunity to overtake the exemplary gardener. They try to drag them just as far into the dark pit of unhappiness and discontent in which they dwell, ultimately landing themselves even lower. They feel that this is the only way possible to rise above the successful exemplary gardener, not realizing that this actually makes them miles and miles lower. The result is a deeper darkness for the odious, so deep that no roots can find nourishment, hope, or love.

In the end, impairing the quality of the best gardens does nothing to improve the appearance of any of the others. It only dulls the overall standards of the community itself, the remaining residents left to wonder what beauty could have become of their vicinity. The content and the covetous end up miserable as the colors of their neighborhood fade to grays, and those who are odious remain stuck drowning in their pits of jealousy, becoming even worse off than the way they were before the exemplary gardeners were daunted.