What's left

Let me tell you a story.

It is interesting when a proverb, assumed to be primordial, is exceedingly contemporary. One 'ancient Chinese' proverb reads something like "the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is now." I love that quote, I use it often. There is no reason to think it goes back further than an article in a Cleveland newspaper in 1967 (source).

Another one is attributed to the Buddha, or a Buddhist writer like Pema Chodron.

"Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

This does go back further, but almost all of its variants and usage comes from 12-step literature published in the 1990s. I also use this quote frequently. It's bad to falsely attribute quotes. That doesn't reduce the power of the words or the implications we can dive into.

This quote about anger has been important to me. I often indulge in self-righteousness. I judge other people who I believe wronged me. That feeling isn't useful to me, it does not make me happier or resolve the tensions I have with others. It cannot force a conclusion to my relationships, good or bad. Ambiguity, the floating sense that I am right, but maybe I am not, is industrial acid. It is a poison that is not graceful to consume, it does not close a Shakespearean tragedy. No ballads shall be composted from my gnawing pain.

Years ago there was an episode of Radiolab entitled "What's Left When You're Right?" As is usual with the show, there are a series of vignettes that are spun into larger commentaries. These dealt with competition, and how winning and losing are much more complicated than the formal rules of the game. I sat with it when it came out, and it comes back into my mind every so often to bump around and get the furniture out of alignment.

What does being right get me? I cannot be sustained on moral victories. It does not make me less lonely, less under-stimulated, less feeling the clock is ticking towards the grave. Righteousness makes me a worse person to be around. If I am holding on to this sense that I have been wrong, betrayed: why are others being brought into this? I will listen to my own friends' grievances about their life, but nobody has infinite capacity for that.

I want to be happy, and I want to be happy with others. Events have made that impossible, with people I have cared about and almost uniformly still do. That means I have to at some point vomit the poison up before it destroys me.

I still want to love and be loved. That requires acting like I am fine amidst the poison.

Artemis