Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Hello, kind readers. This issue of Odd Company happens to fall on Valentine’s Day, the annual celebration of love. As a child, I thought Valentine’s Day was tricky, because my classmates at school exchanged Valentines, and someone’s feelings were bound to be hurt. Kids are not very civilized, which I think we were all at least dimly aware of. What if some unlucky person received no Valentines at all? That person would be the brunt of the day’s most unkind grade-school jokes. There was a certain risk that it could be me. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was worried. One year, our teacher sent a note home from school explaining that all students who wished to give Valentines must give one to each of their classmates. There was plenty of love to go around, and plenty of red construction paper to make Valentines from. No one was to be left out.
Now…there are reasonable objections that could be made to such a scheme. Isn’t exchanging Valentines supposed to be about expressing special affection for someone? What about people I didn’t have any special affection for, like that boy who chased me home from school every afternoon? Why should I have to give a bully a piece of paper that meant I loved him? But I wanted to give Valentines to my friends. It was all or nothing. In the end, this plan worked like gangbusters. Each of us got a big pile of Valentines, even the kids who didn’t have very many friends. We all ate cupcakes with cinnamon hearts on them, and there were no hurt feelings.
Now for tonight’s musical interlude. I had some trouble choosing between two love songs with words written by the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. Both are beautiful, though in different ways. “Ae Fond Kiss,” performed by the Scottish singer Dougie MacLean (easy to find on YouTube) came out of an affair Burns carried on almost entirely via letters with a married woman. As you might guess, it did not come out well. I decided it was just too sad for Valentine’s Day.
But in addition to being a sucker for a good story, I’m a sucker for a capella singing. So here is a beautiful version of Burns’ “My Luve Is Like a Red Red Rose” by the U.K. a capella group Voces8, with just a little flute accompaniment now and then. Burns wrote in a “light” Scottish dialect, so here’s a link to the words, if you want them. It’s a wonderful poem, an exquisite piece of singing, and perfect for this day.
But let’s get back to that kid in my class who terrorized me. The one to whom I did not particularly want to send a Valentine. Almost everyone has had at least one bully in their life — a person who seems to get special pleasure from making other people’s lives miserable. Fairly often, it’s because the bully’s own life is miserable. It’s been said that misery loves company, but it’s usually more complicated than that. If a child grows up without enough love, many confusions can result. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m pretty sure my bully just wanted me to pay attention to him and didn’t understand how to make that happen except by picking on me.
Now, the fairy tale ending for this story would be one in which my mandatory Valentine melted the bully’s heart and turned him into a better person. But that’s…well…a fairy tale. What really happened is that, if anything, the Valentine made matters worse. Daily he chased me home from school with renewed vigor. I asked him repeatedly to stop, and he wouldn’t. So one day I hid a big stick in a clump of bushes I knew we would pass during the usual chase scene. When we got close, I ducked in, grabbed the stick, turned around, and clobbered him on the head with it. Which landed me and my parents, along with the bully and his mom, in the principal’s office. My blow had made him bleed, and his mother had not cleaned the blood off. So there we sat, staring at the evidence of my crime, trying to arrive at the truth. “All he was doing” was chasing me, and I had hit him. I had achieved my goal, which was to make him stop. But I had hurt him in the process. I’d made the common mistake of using more force than I needed to.
What’s a compassionate person to do? There will always be bullies. They range from hellish bosses to petty criminals to people like Vladimir Putin. We might be able to see that their harmful behavior is a result of their suffering. If we ask ourselves what it is that they need and aren’t getting, we might even discover the cause of their suffering. But if the suffering is too great — if they are buried in it — they will continue to engage in behavior that harms others until someone stops them.
In our compassion class, we learned that the most effective way to deal with people who routinely harm others is to treat them as we would treat children. When a child engages in harmful behavior, we stop them as gently and with as much compassion as possible. We set boundaries and consistently enforce them. If we offer an ultimatum, we make sure the terms are well understood. “If you do X, then Y will happen.” And we make sure we’re prepared and willing to make Y happen, if it comes to that. We could view pretty much our entire body of laws as an effort to set boundaries within which we can all live together without hurting each other.
The amount of force we need to stop someone from hurting us varies with the situation, of course. Sometimes we need the police. Sometimes we have to put people in prison. Much of the time, the type of harm involved does not rise to the level of crime. In those cases, we can make our own needs and wishes clear, and we can make sure the other person understands what will happen if they don’t stop. Often, that’s enough to take care of the problem. As we learn in Tai Chi, and as I learned from my childhood experience with the big stick, brute resistance often has unintended (and undesirable) consequences. Sometimes it’s more effective to ask genuinely curious and interested questions. If a person who expects resistance finds himself meeting none, that alone is enough to disorient him and throw him off balance. Once an opponent is off balance, many new possibilities open up. A conversation, for example.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” Once we get to know someone, we come closer to understanding that, in many ways, they are just like us. We all suffer. We all have the same basic human needs. And one of them is love.
Happy Valentine’s Day. Signing off with my effort to explain love. See you in a couple of weeks.
LOVE EXPLAINED TO A BUDDING PHYSICIST
Take as given: we are part of a
whole greater than ourselves,
and within this set of all, some
subsets resonate with others;
entanglement and strange
attractions result
often at random.
Love may be light, gravity, or
the strong or weak forces.
Millions of years and still, its
deep nature a cloud of possibility
based on joy, on grief,
on mystery.
That is the best I can do.
Know that a field may be
infinite in breadth and I hold you
always in mine, whether so near
that you sense my heat,
or across light years.