How To Be Selfish Part Two: Loving the Enemy

When I wrote the article “How to be Selfish” I approached the main premise of the article as doing one’s best to understand what is going on for others in order to see that the person wasn’t just “out to get you.”

I now see that it is quite impossible to truly understand what goes on for others until you truly understand what is going on for you. And to truly understand what is going on for you ultimately means coming to terms with how you are suffering.

Did you just cringe when you read that line? Did a part of you reflexively reject this notion? “But I have a home, a loving family, a good job, how could I be suffering?” And while these things no doubt make life easier, we all go through the same disappointments in life. We all have to die sometime, and in the process there will likely be some pain and suffering. Even before then there are daily sufferings of being misunderstood, not having things go our way (for example that red light that seems timed just to spite us), and even when things go our way they never stay that way for good. I think about that story of how they are always painting the Golden Gate Bridge, because when they finish with one side the other side has been weather-beaten and needs a fresh coat of paint.

These are just the small disappointments of life, ones that we don’t typically think of when we think of suffering (more likely the loss of loved ones, our health, our livelihoods). But they wear on us on a daily basis. We have this gnawing sense of underlying dissatisfaction that things aren’t always going our way. We often start to look to others to fill this need: “If only my boss would give me that corner office.” “If only my wife would recognize I need help with the household responsibilities. ” “If only the liberals/conservatives would come around to my line of thinking we could get things done for the better.”

We go about looking for others to validate us, and we devise subtle and not-so-subtle tests for them to pass or fail in terms of do they “get” us and are they there for us. Most of this is happening on a very unconscious basis, due to the fact that we are mostly tuned into our own suffering and not that of others.

The plain and simple reality is that every living creature on Earth suffers, and every living being at their core desires a life of happiness that is free from suffering. When we separate our own core need from those of others, we make life merely about meeting OUR needs. This is a small mind, one that doesn’t take into account our interdependent nature with others. As we grasp at getting our own needs met without taking into account others, we experience small victories but ultimately they feel hollow. We’re only as good as the last time someone validated us. This is no way to live.

So to find happiness that lasts is to ultimately allow yourself awareness of our universal desire for this experience, that others do not differ from you in the least in this regard. If someone is expressing angry and hurtful words to us, we can see that it is not the person that is making us suffer as much as the emotion of anger that is creating suffering for both of us. We get swept up in creating stories based on our transitory feeling state that reacts to the person: “He’s so selfish, she’s so insensitive, this is just so typical, how DARE he!” We get carried away by our stories, our thoughts that are feeding our own angry response. We stay stuck by blaming the other person’s actions for our suffering, all the while blind to the fact that it is we ourselves who are perpetuating the suffering by extending the narrative.

We ourselves have experienced this transitory emotion and harmed others as a result of it, so if we try to we can relate to what it is doing to the other person. Our compassion can and must start with ourselves: that we don’t deserve to be hurt, and we can leave the situation and/or take appropriate non-violent action to stop the abuse. But we must ultimately allow ourselves compassion for the other person as well, that he or she is also ultimately suffering because of attachment to anger. I know this is a strange way to conceive of things, and one that is often not socially validated, but compassion to those who hurt us can free us from staying stuck in the toxic suffering of the emotion ourselves.

We must wake up and recognize that so long as we are waiting for others to validate us, we are giving up too much power to others and that the happiness we receive when someone “passes our test” is fleeting. When WE become the validators, the compassionate ones who are considering others’ experience and needs, the validation tends to come back to us naturally and we may find more lasting happiness.