Instead of the Friday Blog Roundup
I rarely do this, but all has been quiet on the blogging front. So instead I pass along three pieces of advice/ways of viewing the world that I have been mulling over for weeks. Do any of them speak to you, too?
The first was in a GQ article about Ram Dass. I don’t know a lot about Ram Dass, but this quote felt like it summarized 2018:
That’s when Ram Dass articulated an idea that held as much truth and force in 2017 as it did when he said it 49 years earlier. “I know many of you will feel uncomfortable when I say this, but the hippies create the police as much as the police create the hippies,” he said, his Kennedy-esque Boston accent still intact. “That the liberals create the conservatives. The protesters create the John Birchers just as much as the John Birchers create the protesters. That as long as you are attached to whatever pole you are representing, the vibrations which you are sending out are creating its polar opposite around you. If you can do whatever is your karma—which may be walking in a protest march or fighting in Vietnam, or being a conservative or a liberal or being a housewife or being a yogi—and can do it without attachment, and do it fully and thoroughly but without attachment, then you do not create that karma. You do not create the polar opposite.”
It’s something I’ve said a lot over the years, even more so since the election two years ago: You can be pro-something without being anti-something else. Not every “for” needs to be defined by what it’s “against.” Though, of course, sometimes — for the sake of your own sanity and the lives of others — you have to be anti-something, too.
Your reaction?
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The next two are both from Carolyn Hax. The first is a response to a letter she got where the person was upset that a sibling wasn’t responding to their news on a group text despite this same family member voicing support for another sibling. The question asker wants to know if it’s cool if they cut out that family member from future news shares.
Carolyn responds:
I think it’s absolutely astonishing that you’re poised to punish a till-now “close” sibling because you “can’t help feeling they must feel” they “have . . . reason for feeling” that “it seems” “I’m feeling” they “seemed to pointedly” feel. Or seem. Or point.
A lot of seem and feel, signifying nothing.
Before you start a cold war, at least make even a cursory effort to find out whether the other side is actually on the other side … Choose not to take things personally, and watch most problems go away.
It was just this great reminder to look at how often we talk about our feelings and take them as fact. When… they’re just that. Feelings. Maybe not always the best information source to use to make life-changing decisions.
The second is a person who has found happiness after a struggle, and Hax asks a question in return that I think I’m going to use in the future when I tell myself that I don’t deserve to enjoy a moment. The person asks: “How do I get over the feeling that I don’t deserve this happiness?”
Carolyn responds: “If you don’t, then who does? Real question, not rhetorical.”
Perfect on both counts, don’t you think?
9 comments
I really like your first world view. I guess the thing I am trying to learn now is to let go after my husband’s death. So ultimately I won’t be creating my own grief. Not being attached to him or his stuff, although it’s a work in progress. Then I guess I will get my happiness in the end.
I like all that advice, yes.
RE the Ram Dass one. I think it’s different than “You can be pro-something without being anti-something else.”
I think it’s this: when you lend your energy to resisting something, you end up empowering that something. This is the flaw in #Resist movements. Resisting empowers what it hopes to reduce.
That said, I don’t yet know what is the Right Response to injustice.
Ooooh, I love that — “If I don’t deserve this happiness, then who does?” A great thing to run through my head when I’m having those moments. I also like the not taking thing personally and watching problems disappear advice — that is so, so true. I think a lot of times we manufacture all kinds of things that could be happening due to a person’s communication or lack of communication (does a period in a text mean the person is passive-aggressively mad at you? Or does it mean they’re just not excited enough for an exclamation point? Sometimes do I overthink punctuation? YES, yes I do). And it causes problems from assuming that we know the whole story when usually we don’t. This just happened to me at work, and I had to hug it out with someone I was preemptively furious with but it turned out my anger was misdirected and I felt like an ass.
And huzzah to to being for something without being against something else, for putting energy out for a cause and not necessarily having it be so intense that it creates a sort of anti-matter. Your question is interesting and I don’t have an answer…is it worth it to be vehemently against something or someone if it means protecting the vulnerable? Huh, when I put it that way the answer is definitely YES.
My response to the first piece: bullshit. I didn’t create racist assholes by caring about other people, wanting there to be social safety nets, supporting gay rights, etc.
I’m sorry there’s nothing wrong with being against racist fucking bigots
I think regarding the second brene Brown inventend the great sentence: What I am making up right now is that: ( you don’t respond because you are fed up with my stories. ) (you don’t love me anymore). It is such a usefull way to tell the other person what you are hearing with acknowledging that that might not be what they mean at all.
YES. It is so important to be able to be for something without being against something else.
I experience frustration with this with a family member and a group they have become a part of who call themselves patriots but really just don’t like people who are different.
I can be pro-America without being anti-immigrants/ Muslims/ etc.
Liberals did not create racists. Racists have been around since there were people. That’s a weird sort of woo.
And I’m fairly sure that #resist is decreasing vocal racists, not increasing them. Though yes, trump has increased fighters on the side of good, but that’s not because we didn’t believe passionately before, that’s because we were able to be lazy and still see progress. Without trump black lives matter would be getting stronger generally because the media would still be covering black deaths because we wouldn’t be torturing and killing immigrant children. Trump quieted that movement by creating a crisis, he didn’t strengthen it. And we all were passionately against the holocaust before, we just didn’t have to do anything about it because we weren’t creating immigrant concentration camps. We’re still not doing enough, though other than donating to raices and calling elected officials and supporting media stories I don’t know what to do. And that’s ignoring BLM!
Gotta agree with Working Mom and Nicoleandmaggie – I’m not anti-racist because I don’t like racists. I’m anti-racist because I believe people of all sorts are equal (and mostly equally annoying, but that’s another story). The hippies didn’t create the police or even the police response. Conservative traditionalists who wanted everyone to conform involved the police in their personal views, which were directed at people who wouldn’t conform. Nah – not having that one at all.
Re: # 2: Not taking things personally with family is incredibly difficult, though – there’s a whole history that’s unspoken and might be intrinsic to the idea that the apparent lack of interest is deliberate. It’s easy to say from the outside that you shouldn’t burn your bridges, but I’d suspect there’s some missing context.