I've been loved, hated, feared, loathed, respected, scorned, unjustly maligned, praised for what I should not have been praised for, lionized, demonized, put on a pedestal, dragged through the mud, understood, misunderstood, ill-understood, well-understood, ignored, fawned upon, admired, envied, tolerated, and found intolerable. And the same most likely goes for you.
I've been the object of Schadenfreude, of glacial indifference, of jealousy. I've been fought over and thought not worth fighting over. I've been the object of every emotional attitude by someone or other, at some time or other, for some reason or other, or for no reason at all. I've been loved and then hated by the same person, and the other way around. I've been liked by people who do not love me, and loved by people who do not like me. I attract and I repel, sometimes different people, sometimes the same people at different times. I attract and repel myself, at different times, and pace the Law of Non-Contradiction, sometimes at the same time. I am different people to different people and different people to myself. And the same most likely goes for you.
There is no need to protract the litany — but what distillate of wisdom is to be squeezed from these grapes?
a) The human heart is fickle, and there is no call to care too much about what anyone thinks of one, whether good or bad — even oneself. I preach not apathy, but mesopathy, if I may coin a word, emotional response measured and middle-sized and thus appropriate to the images on the wall of the Cave.
b) Human reality is an ever-shifting play of perspectives and evaluations and, insofar forth, bare of ultimate reality and so not to be taken with utmost seriousness. All wisdom traditions teach the need of detachment or non-attachment. You are grasping at straws and chasing after shadows if you seek your ultimate reality in the broken mirrors of others' subjectivity. And your mirror is broken too.
c) If you have been done wrong, think of the times you have done others wrong. If on occasion you have not gotten what you deserve, recall the times when you got more than you deserved — and perhaps at the expense of the more deserving. If you judge that you have been unfairly treated, bear in mind that it is just someone's judgment that you have been unfairly treated, and that the mere fact that this someone is you is not all that significant.
Recent Comments