| I'm not a quiet guy, I'm generally somewhat genial -- but that can make my occasional fits of anger all the more disconcerting to those around me (or virtually around me). It's something I've had to deal with my whole life -- I was a real hothead when I was young.
But I got to a point, when I was a young man, that more and more of the world I saw around me really pissed me off. And, as I defined more and more of the world around me as evil or stupid or just terminally annoying, that world became an increasingly stupid, evil, and just plain annoying place to live.
When I finally stumbled on a strategy for dealing with it, I wasn't immediately aware that it paralleled the teachings of people like Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tsu, Zoroaster, et al.
For me the strategy grew out of my study of psychology (in school and out) and my rational belief in causality.
It occurred to me at a certain point that, at any given point in time, a person is the sum of his experience and his physical process. He or she may have a choice about the future (free will is a pragmatic notion to hold, I've found, at least for me) but at that moment, they are simply who they are and what events and conditions have led them to be at that moment.
That doesn't mean I have to like them, enjoy being around them, even tolerate them -- but it does give me a leverage point in my own process to sort of forgive them for being who they are right then. And by forgiving them, I'm also releasing that part of my mind that was going to be caught up in judging and emotionally reacting to them.
Now, of course, I, too, (I found) am human. So I also have to forgive myself when I find myself having unproductive reactions to things around me, internalizing my negative reactions and so potentially binding me to that which I'm having the negative reaction to.
The pragmatic aspect here is to allow oneself to be oneself, and not beat oneself up for not living up to one's own ideals or intended approach to life, as well as to free oneself from internalizing all-too-natural negative reactions to people (or events) around us.
This does not mean turning a blind eye to evil or stupidity or passively accepting it -- much the contrary. It allows one to actually go mano a mano with the very real trouble in one's life and in this troubled world, while giving one a strategy for dealing with the inevitable human reactions to all that in the world which is worse than we might like it to be.
In other words, just because you are attempting to contextualize negative emotions, people or events in such a way as to not poison yourself with your 'natural' reactions to them, you are not disengaging from the world or the 'battle against evil.' But you are, hopefully giving yourself a pragmatic strategy that will enable you to engage or not engage with those aspects of the world without letting that evil poison oneself.
I hope that makes some kind of sense. I haven't had much coffee yet. |