Resentment

I resent someone. I don't hate her. I even understand why she's doing what she's doing that frustrates and infuriates me. She has her reasons and they are actually quite good ones. I might well be doing the same thing if I were in her shoes. This realization doesn't help much.

Now, this is worth remarking on mostly because it is not all that common for me. I don't often resent, not any more. But I used to be a world champion resenter. I could resent you for eating lunch. Breathing my air was an unforgivable offense. I could warm up a hundred or so resentments between the time I woke up and the time I opened my eyes, a thousand before breakfast, and pretty much everyone I encountered by the time I left the house.

When I needed to make a list of resentments as part of a spiritual program I undertook, China was on my list. Not just the country and its government, but every single one of the billions of people who lived there. Just because. China. Billions. I didn't mess around with Luxembourg or Venezuela. China.

But what was revealed by the effort to seek a better way of living my life was that resentment was a mask for fear. Actually, I have come to the conclusion (with some help from my spiritual friends) that not only resentment, but anger, unhappiness, depression (in many cases), greed, lust, cruelty, violence, and hatred are all fear in scary masks. Because fear is wimpy, dontchaknow, but hatred, ah, now that feels like a manly sort of thing.

Resentment made me feel superior to all of you (certainly all of China), and I needed to feel that way because I feared that I was actually grossly inferior, in fact not worth the skin I was printed on, worthless. But I found out that this was not so, that I am merely human and pretty much as worthwhile as anyone and everyone else. Sad but true, the hierarchy of worth is, in fact, artificial and largely nonsense, no matter what Ted Cruz may think.

And resentment, as the saying goes, is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die. It only contaminates me. Certainly the Chinese remained unharmed by my vitriol. As part of the path I had undertaken, I had to examine my resentments and find out what part of them had to do with me, with my fears and hurt feelings and confusion. Which turned out to be...oh...all of them.

Which is not to say that people don't do shitty things or that we should let them get away with them. For one thing, someone who is cruel or violent or abusive to me will undoubtedly find another victim, and I have a solemn responsibility to prevent that if I can. But the idea that it will have any positive effect whatsoever for me to stew in the juices of hatred is just absurd on the face of it. In fact, change for the better must begin from a place of acceptance and love; working from a place of anger will only exhaust me and lead to more harm.

So, to return to my present resentment. Because I don't resent all the time and have become very comfortable in my peace and sense of well-being, now even a single resentment feels like a shard of ice in my heart; cold, sharp, hard, painful. I can't stand it. I have a feedback mechanism now that tells me when I have gone there. This is healthy and right.

The solution, I am told (and have experienced) is to wish for this person everything I would wish for myself. I wish her health and well-being and peace and harmony and love. I wish for her to be comfortable and healed. I wish for all her dreams to come true. I wish her miracles. I wish her joy.

It's not easy. I am selfish. I want what I want and I want it now. I wish I could say that I am motivated by pure altruism, but the truth is that I don't want it to hurt anymore. That's OK. Why I do good things is not as important as the fact that I do them. I will have to wait a few lifetimes down the road for sainthood. But at least the Chinese are safe from my wrath. Bet they're relieved.

IOU

I have no delusion that Phillip Seymour Hoffman owed me anything. He didn't know me, nor I him. We weren't friends. Still...

Art is a contract, isn't it? We both (creator and consumer) invest something in the exchange and expect something in return. That seems only fair. Without my emotional investment, the roles Hoffman played would be meaningless to me. And without a similar investment by thousands of others, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did at all, because there wouldn't have been an audience for it.

Don't get me wrong, I think the guy had every right to be a junkie if he wanted. He had the right to take his own life, too, if the overdose was intentional (though I choose to think it was not). But still there is an anger in me that he left so soon, that what I gave, though a minuscule part of the whole, was so lightly regarded that he could die before his time. That perspective feels a bit bizarre even to me, but I think it's a valid one.

Not taking care to stay here for us is a breach of faith, it seems to me. Now, retiring from the scene (as in Grace Kelly, for instance, or J.D. Salinger) is a different matter—they and others like them decide for whatever reason that they are through with serving up what we want. But to exit inadvertently or with malice, either one, is to rip apart that bond between us, no matter how tenuous it might be.

David Foster Wallace

Do you hear that, Marilyn? John Belushi, are you listening? David Foster Wallace, you prick, did you hear what I said? Does this ring a bell, Heath? C'mon, Kurt, did you really have to put that gun in your mouth? James Gandolfini, Andy Kaufman, Whitney Houston, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, Jimi, Janice, oh the list goes on and on. It is so sad. I feel so deprived.

And I feel a bit of a cheat, too. What business do I have to still be alive when The Big Bopper died so young?

Yet, we carry on. The world goes round. We celebrate who they were and listen, watch, and read what they did. We hold them in our hearts. We hope they are at peace. We wish them well on the journey. We go on.

But It's Still Work

I have been writing quite a bit lately about letting go, which sounds so easy. And it is easy, once we get past all of the things that stand in the way. But getting past those things requires an enormous amount of work.

Now, why should this be? I have been curious about this question for as long as I remember. Why are we not just born with an innate sense of the value of letting go of all those things that keep us from happiness and joy? Is there some adaptive reason why we can't just begin life as wise beings?

I think there is. Of course, some people are born more wise than others (I have no idea why that might be so, though it seems to be), but all of us have to go through the maturation process of separation from our parents and making our way in the world, which is, in a word, terrifying. It might also be wonderful, exciting, and cool, but it is nonetheless terrifying. We respond to that terror with ways of coping which make life more bearable, but which also isolate us, place barriers between ourselves and others and also between ourselves and the naked truth.

Babies are born with an utter openness, which they then lose. Those of us seeking freedom later in life must work to get that openness back. But it would be futile to hang on to that infantile openness, because only with experience can we gain wisdom. And it is only when the openness is combined with wisdom that it can actually lead anywhere worth going. Freedom without wisdom is empty, even dangerous.

But what exactly is the work we have in front of us? That is, perhaps, the most important question we will ever ask ourselves. I suppose that for each of it the form this work takes is different, measured out not only on the basis of our preferences, but as a result of our individual experiences. Still, there is a common theme to the work we must do if we are to reach the freedom that is available to each of us.

I have come to believe that this work may have no better name than kindness. I am aware that this seems a bit wimpy; I could have said "justice" or "spiritual awakening" or "enlightenment", but I truly believe that these (and other such aspirations) are a result, more than anything, of kindness. Because if we aspire for ourselves, we are leaving behind all those poor, benighted others that don't achieve what we achieve. Only with a heart of kindness can we know that all must be brought along with us for spiritual attainment to be worthwhile.

Language, as always, is inadequate to express what exactly I mean by kindness. In Pali, the word metta is familiar to most practitioners of the Dharma. Metta is generally taken to mean "lovingkindness", but also translates (so I am told) as "unconditional friendliness" and "openheartedness", as well as other, similar terms. What would it be like to be entirely loving, friendly, and openhearted? What would it take to be thoroughly kind?

What would be required is complete and unconditional acceptance of life as it is, of others as they are, of ourselves just as we are in this moment. What would be required is letting go, but doing so with unconditional love.

Does this sound impossible? It's not. It's unlikely, but not impossible. And the good news is that we can start absolutely anywhere. Try this: be the nicest person the grocery store clerk encounters all day. Just do that. It is an act of love. It is openheartedness. It is metta. It is not only the road to ultimate peace, but the road to true freedom, what we choose to call nirvana. We can achieve this one grocery clerk at a time. Start there. Work your way up to the person you find most unforgivable. When we hate or resent, when we put any creature out of our hearts, we are only poisoning ourselves.

It is simple, truly it is. Not easy, but simple. Peace awaits us.