How We Hurt One Another

How We Hurt One Another

There are times in life when giving and receiving pain seems unavoidable. I would even suggest that it always seems unavoidable, an emotional outburst, the quick explosion of action and reaction to a sudden synapse of cherished judgments. The reason for the action is always obvious. If it were not obvious, we would have employed caution and deliberately calculated our impact.

It is a common misperception to see everyone’s worlds through our own lenses. How changed relations among people would be if we each took responsibility for
getting into the skin and mind of another and, more importantly, for attempting to respect that perception and those conclusions thereafter.

What passes instead for civil discourse is an isolated intransigence in which
we actually defend remaining closed to others’ worlds, as if announcing a fatal
weakness was enough to affirm its righteousness. When is personal weakness
an acceptable virtue? Why not see it as defining a goal to work towards,
remembering that the mere act of affirming the need to change is the most
important step in achieving change. But hopelessness abounds.

If we did not care about each other, we could not hurt one another. How
powerful is that thought, that you care enough about me to dislike me, to despise
me, to hate me! What you are really saying is that you care for and love me –
but in reverse. The strongest blows come not from strangers and enemies but
from our loved ones, those in the position to do the most damage. The more I
love, the more I can suffer. But if I close myself off to suffering, I close myself off
to love too. Love does not come cheap.

Recovering from a hurt or a wound can be quick or it can be impossible, or
something in between. The common remedy is the quick fix: I’ll forget it if you
forget it – until it happens again, which it invariably will. It is the lazy, ineffective and common way out. Exhaustion leads to resolution, which is merely temporary and not resolution at all.

At critical points in our life we are not disposed to resolving a dispute or
difference. To do so would be too costly to our emotional equilibrium, the
perceived implications of a change of mind too risky and dangerous. What we
know and value, what we have learned largely from childhood, is self-evident and
not up for discussion or contradiction. It is our truth, to which we must cling, or
we have and are nothing at all. How blessed it is to get to the point of such self
confidence and detachment that others’ thoughts and opinions are not threats
to us but differences in human discourse that we can understand, negotiate and
tolerate.

There is no right. There is only what makes each one of us true and free.