I don’t want to write this. I don’t even know how to write this.
Today’s awareness prompt is brought to us by Buster Benson.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?
Summation of the thought stream below: Most people are good. Perceive one as bad and you can throw them away with indifference. This is how a tribe of ‘like minds’ is created with a driven clarity. A tribe with the same moral base provides roots capable of supporting positive individual growth. Not so much about powering the world as it is making my own world liveable.
Here’s how I worked the belief out of myself:
This prompt brings out the battle, my pain, the angst I have with the world at large.
My one strong belief that is not shared by closest friends and family? That people are inherently good.
What inspires this belief? My childhood. Up until the age of 14 my world was full of liars, drunks, cruelty and abuse. Something inside of me (I don’t know what or why) said “Life won’t always be like this. You were just born into hardship. Other people aren’t all this way.”
Perhaps it is what I needed to believe to survive each day at the hands of my abusers.
I understand it is a Pollyanic approach to life. The belief at times serves me well. At others, it hasn’t. At best it allows me to see the beauty of other’s souls. At worst it exposes my heart. When you trust that the world is full of goodness and purity, the cruel march towards you chanting: “Yes, another soul to exploit!”
The alternative extreme – to shut down completely, believing that the world is full of selfishness, pettiness, or rage – is more painful.
I have tried both.
“Find a happy medium and live your life.”
I can find no middle ground.
I am (so far) incapable of being ‘half this’ or ‘half that’.
I am ‘all or nothing’.
I either love you ferociously or (if you have purposefully hurt me) you do not exist.
What have I done to actively live it? Herein lies the difference between how I choose to live vs. how others tell me I should live. Countless elders have told me, their faces smacking with self-righteousness: “People are not like pieces of paper. You cannot throw people away.”
But I can.
And I do.
I begin every relationship believing that the person is pure of heart (or nearly pure), is kind, is thoughtful, is loving, is ‘aware’. (That’s the Pollyanic – unshared by my closest friends.)
And should it come to my awareness – through personal suffering or by observation of action – that my associate is completely self-serving or cruel, I toss them without guilt and (sometimes) with as much kindness as I can muster. Some people have not allowed me to easily dispose of them – then I have been less than kind.
To resolve: I state that we are not of the same ilk. Not in a snobbish fashion, but in a tribal sense.
The result: my souls to love can be counted on one hand. I live my final days believing that people are inherrently good and I have just not found my tribe.
If, as Buster Benson says, “The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action,” this strong belief is not meant to power the world — but to make my own world liveable.
