“People are tired - strafed by life - mutilated either by love or no love… people are not
good to each other one on one. - People are just not good to each other. - We are afraid.
We think that hatred signifies strength. That punishment is love.” – Charles Bukowski.
It takes no more than a dog barking a little too long or a person moving around a little
too loudly while we are in a wretched mood that we didn’t choose, to feel a visceral
reminder of the non-rhythmic disorder always around and in us. To feel a world that is
propelled and shared with innumerable other beings, all wanting it to sound and move as
if it were their own just as much as we do, all struggling over such an impossibility.
We know we aren’t the center of everything. We learned that, hopefully, sometime in very
early adolescence. However, despite this, each inevitable disillusioning experience
can inject us with, at least to some degree, a sense that we have been singled out. That
we have personally and intentionally been given a misery or frustration that requires
blame or answer. Of course, some of the time this is the case. But how often do we confuse
the faults of being in general with the faults of other people and things specifically? How
often do we confuse the anxiety and confusion and plight of all humankind with our own?
Everyone is experiencing the same dissonance of being, living their own story through the
nauseating rollercoaster of ups and downs to nowhere. It is both banal and almost hollow
to say that we should be compassionate and kind to others because of this. Every 1st
grade child knows this in less words. The notion of togetherness and compassion is sold
to us in soda and fast-food commercials as well as nearly every Disney movie. It is so
commodified, cliché, and obvious that it’s hard to even take seriously the idea of needing
to consider it further. Life isn’t a soda commercial nor a Disney
movie, and it isn’t anywhere near as clean as a first-grade child could likely even imagine.
There is a world filled with malevolence and anger and greed and impatience and all the
rest. But because of this very reason—because compassion is so trite and yet still seemingly
so hard and absent—it is perhaps all the more essential and rational of a serious focus
and effort. Although it can, and at times almost certainly
should be, compassion need not be synonymous with what might generally be considered agreeableness.
Rather, the compassion being referred to here more suggests a sympathetic understanding
of others’ lack of agreeableness. An awareness serving to help calibrate our easily incited
impatience or anger or finger pointing or disdain towards others over mostly nothing,
or things that we can’t really know or understand. There is a suffering and confusion apart of
existence that we all know and feel yet seem to so often struggle to grant others.
To not see the so obviously unobvious thing behind everything. To hate. To seek vengeance.
To frequently act on anger. To declare certainty in almost anything. All contradict the very
struggle and confusion of life that we feel such a pain over in the first place.
How often do we turn minor inconveniences into major ones over this lack of consideration?
Or worse yet, turn tragedies of random circumstance into tragedies of hatred?
It’s not that if one is annoyed by or disagrees with another person or group, they shouldn’t.
Nor should they not try to work for what they believe in or against what they disagree with.
But it is perhaps worth approaching all instances, as often as we can, with the awareness that
the ignorance and annoyance and sometimes cruelty we find in others is sometimes found
by others in us. Sometimes at the same time and with equally valid reasons.
Who is right in such cases? Perhaps in some of them, no one is. And perhaps not even the
person who thinks they’ve trumped such an occurrence by realizing it’s happening and
determining they are superior to both parties by realizing how foolish both are. Even here,
if one acts in such a way, one is exhibiting a conceit and smugness over others by thinking
that they have superiorly realized the foolishness of being conceited and smug. Everyone is absurd
in their attempt to trump their own absurd relationship with everything. And everyone
is all the more so when they do not realize that they, even here, are also a part of everyone.
There is but one thing that seems to have any positive effect against such absurdity:
a sort of compassion for the whole. An understanding that everyone is in it. And everyone is flailing
against it for the same reasons as everyone else. And thus, within limits perhaps, everyone
deserves such a consideration and compassion. Of course, there are actions and people that
exist in a category that warrant harsh scrutiny and proper handling. Like all things, there
are cases that reside further out in the extreme where the lines become blurrier and the response
less obvious. But it could be argued that a certain compassion is still applicable,
even if a conflicting response is necessary. Ultimately, there is a movement in this world
with no one in the driver’s seat, everyone dealt different, complex, nuanced hands of
good and bad luck; all of which causes everyone to be who they are and aren’t. At bottom,
no one chooses who they are born as, and no one chooses everything that happens thereafter,
but ultimately, everything forms what one is. In the words of Schopenhauer, “Man can
do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
As always, none of this is to make light of the colossal difficulty of accomplishing such
a thing. Being not only aware of, but also acting in accordance to such a compassion
is an incredibly hard and constant effort; most likely impossible in the complete sense.
And because it’s so hard, a great number of people don’t. And since a great number
of people don’t, it’s only exponentially harder. For most, if not all of us, it is
an ember that is perpetually on the brink of burning out. But also, for most, if not
all of us, we are constantly teetering in and out of being the one that is in need of
compassion and understanding. And with every insight and consideration, with every moment
of self-reflection and temperance, there is an opportunity to influence a slight change
in the cycle, even if it’s just in us. To use our awareness of our unawareness as a
source of compassion and understanding for others and ourselves as opposed to a source
of disdain and bitterness. To use our unique conscious position to know how hard it is
to be in a conscious position. And to acknowledge that everyone else is, in fact, also
in one.