Wise Words? Other People

The ability to separate yourself from the world around you around you and discern different things about each of its pieces is one of the crucial components of human consciousness

From the time we are babies, we are aware that not all our needs can be met by our own bodies and selves. We rely on someone else, hopefully a stable parental figure of some kind, to provide us with the basic necessities. Food to ease our aching tummies, shelters to keep the bad noises and feelings outside and away from us, and clothing to keep those terrible chills from returning when we're trying to sit still and exist.

As we grow slightly older, our need for other people becomes slightly less desperate. We find that actually food does not have to come from other people we can find it all over the place if we know where to look (admittidly its easy to make mistakes as to what to eat and what not to eat at very early ages. Some babies try to swallow LEGO's or other toys, for me the sand at the beach had an irresistible crunch which I learned the consequences of the hard way), we find that we actually feel a certain specific and sometimes violent way about the things other people want to cover our bodies with and start to voice opinions on the matter, and we learn that there are more places to avoid the elements and seek comfort than just the one which contains our parents.

Still though, for most of early life, our life is defined by our relationship with our parents or guardian figure. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a stable parental presence in their life, some are unlucky enough to have a persistent but problematic presence in their life, whatever your story is its impossible to deny that the ways we interact with some of our early guardian and authority figures direct how we interact with all the separate people in our lives going forward. For better or for worse, the people who are around us when we are very small teach us a lot of lessons, some true some not. Depending on who you are and who raised you, you may view other people as generally trustworthy or generally unreliable, generally kind or generally mean, generally attentive or generally dismissive, and so on. These interactions and opinions cement two things in the early mind: the things we can acquire from other people and how other people generally make us feel.

As life goes on, you may find that your parents are no longer able to fulfill every single need you have. In my case they were great, but they were raised in a context fundamentally different to mine and so my childhood was full of things which their childhood was not, creating misunderstandings. My dad grew up around the woods of Kentucky and had plenty of space to run around and let his imagination and spirit run wild which seemed a stark contrast to the safe and sectioned off subdivision where I grew up. My mom grew up in my same subdivision, but in an age where computers and video games were no where near as advanced and prevalent as they were when I was growing up in the 2000s. Eventually I wanted to interact with other people who saw the world through a similar lens as I did and cared about similar things. Based on the exact combination of factors which define my personality this was hard to find, and so I learned that other people my age were not necessarily guaranteed to understand me. This set up all sorts of complications in my life, and regardless of where you may have grown up or what that situation was like I can guarantee it formed your early impressions of the world at large and the way it made you feel. You may have even begun noticing differences in the behavior and expectations of your own home which formed your initial impressions of the world and the greater society outside of your front door. And importantly, you may also begin to conceive of other people as sources of feelings and things. You may turn to your friends for understanding after a disagreement with your parents, other households and establishments for good and services not available within the confines of your own home, and you may even start to get a sense of how you feel on your own removed from all of these factors versus being immersed in them and surrounded by other people.

My specific set of situations and experiences coded me to be an introvert, and one who felt severely defective compared to others around me who were clearly capable of achieving more and impressing and gratifying those around me more than I could. This gave me a sense throughout my growing years that my life was not impactful enough, that the world outside of my parents house did not care for my existence one way or the other, and that alone was how I was supposed to be and destined to be. I spent a lot of time, specifically in the later years of high school and early college, searching and seeking a romantic partner who would make me feel the sort of warm loving feelings which I enjoyed so much of in my early years but with someone who felt more similar to me and appreciated me in the way only a romantic partner can. Though we use one word, love, to describe our feelings towards both parental/ guardian figures  and romantic/ life partners the things we desire from the ones we love change drastically throughout our lives. At the bookends of life we seem to mostly desire companionship and reliability, and in the middle section (what some call the "prime" but I think that's a little reductive and counterproductive) and in the middle we seem to crave more excitement and fulfillment. My feelings of not being impactful enough or having enough consequence on the world around me were challenged greatly by my first real relationship, which to spare the gory details, hurt a lot of people both in the time it occurred and in the aftermath. 

I was one of those people. In the fallout of some of these major early choices, I started to think about how vulnerable and desperate it made me to be searching so specifically for a loving and romantic partner to make me feel better about myself. So instead of searching for a way to fill the hole in my heart, I started searching for a way to understand why the hole was there and what could be done to stop it from being there at all. Because the way I was filling it in my toxic relationship may have felt good, but in reality it only made the hole bigger. It was truly a case of the more you have the more you want. An addiction to reassurance and validation. I started looking for answers to questions I never had before. Primarily, what were these emotions of longing and loneliness I was feeling? I understood that they had been in me for a long time but I did not know how to address them without getting them from somewhere else. I may have figured out where food shelter and clothing could come from by my own efforts, but I struggled to earn the love I knew as a child from new people. 

This search for an understanding of my own heart hole lead me to the most disciplined and oldest school of critical thought there is: Philosophy. I started reading some of Aristotle's ethics and started to understand that certain needs and feelings are pervasive throughout human history. Even this man who lived thousands of years ago and never spoke a single word of English, was expressing ideas and understandings about human emotion: where it comes from, whether it can be controlled (sorry, nope), and how much of our personality it defines. While I found Artistotle's questions satisfying and provocative, he did not seem to be as focused on filling the holes within human hearts as I was. So I turned from Aristotle to a school of thought and sort of religion even older than him: Budhism. 

At the time of this writing I have not been to a Buddhist place of worship and have never even talked to another Buddhist in person so I'm not sure if I qualify for that label at this time, but  I have done a little reading and came to some meaningful understandings which I will now pass along to you. 

Its a common notion that a center of Buddhism is meditation and indeed it is, but some people do not understand what mediation is or why it can be so helpful. Some people, as Duncan Trussel so eloquently put it, see meditation as a buttplug in the asshole of the mind. Trying to stop all rational thoughts and focus only on breathing. And while its true that focus on the breath is a way to return your mind to the present moment, it is not the end goal of mediation. There is no end goal to mediation. It is a process of easing your mind and trying to put a little space between yourself and your thoughts. It unhooks the human mind from the matrix that is global capitalism with its constant focus on past mistakes and future goals and instead forces you to focus on just this moment. Just this one. The one you, nameless person in the future, may be in while reading this. The one I as the writer am in writing it. The separate one I am in slightly later while editing this before publishing. These moments. Every separate moment between the beginning and end of our lives which ultimately defines the whole of one lifetimes.

However, there is more to Buddhism than just this return to the present. Rather than being the end goal of mediation, it is in fact the starting place of Buddhism. From this starting place, you can begin to hear the Buddha's words and feel joy from them. There are several passages I've read which ring true to me now, particularly how gender has no bearing on human understanding of the dharma, but the one which has helped me gain perspective on my relationship and life at large is the idea that each human being is a complete entity. We are all defined by separate pieces and parts which all have positive and negative qualities. Its easy to focus on one of these things, two of the most common choices being the appearance of the body and the performance of the mind, as the totality of what defines you as a human being, but this is not the case. If we focus on not just these individual parts, but pn all the different things we are and feel, we begin to see that we as human are just enough being just the person we are. This is not to say that human flaws don't exist or that self improvement is unnecessary, but it does help to re-frame both of those things in a more positive light. Instead of focusing on your flaws and thinking they are all others see you for, learn to accept that your perception of your flaws is based on your own judgement of yourself and that you are almost certainly your own worse critic. With a little space from these pieces of self critique, self improvement becomes less about fixing a broken or worthless object and more about having the ability to take the dynamic and living pieces of your own self and helping them to grow in new, exciting, and fulfilling ways. The way this applies to my own life, is that I am trying to see myself as more of an in progress force rather than an incomplete or incompetent one.

I like to think of the human race as a collection of stars. Each comes from somewhere, each shines with the bright light of reactivity, and no two are ever exactly the same. The light shining from each star produces not just light which can be seen from other stars, but warmth to planets which may circle around its orbit. Think of these different planets as the different pieces which define you. Your heart, your head, your body, your soul, your relationships to other people, your goals, dreams, ambitions, desires, everything. We are none of these things, but rather we are the center ball of heat and energy which all of these other things revolve around and are dependent on. If we burn too brightly, if we seek too desperately or step on the hearts of others on the roads to our ambitions, we risk expanding this ball of energy beyond a range which can be contained safely and risk burning some of these pieces of ourselves which help to define us. However if we are too passive, if we do not put off enough energy if we wallow in sadness for huge portions of our lives (as I have), we risk watching these planets float away off into deep space, as dead and lifeless as we feel. The idea I suppose I'm driving at with this entire questionable metaphor is a central idea in Buddhism: the middle path. We must burn brightly enough to both maintain the pieces of ourselves we chose to keep and to attract new pieces to further define and love our system of human attributes, while being careful to not overdo things and peruse destructive ends.

So instead of seeing other people around you as competing sources of energy, see them instead as lights against the darkness of impermanence. Any person you meet at any time in your life is just as much of a rare and unique occurrence as you, and they likely have their own ideas about almost everything, some of which may provide incredibly valuable lessons. Either way, the most important thing is to recognize that all the stars which make up our portion of space time are doing their best to shine as well as they can, and that, no matter what other people may say, is enough.