Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to Odd Company on this last day of February. Tomorrow March begins, the danger of frost is past in these parts, and I can start planting the little cabbages I’ve been nurturing from seed for the past month or so. They are quickly outgrowing their pots. Like most young things, they want to be out in the wide world, living their lives. They can no longer be true to themselves within the confines of the pots and cloches that have kept them safe and warm so far. They are changing day by day, and fast!
There is a piece of music I often find floating through my mind on spring mornings, especially in the peace of the garden. Written by the Quebecois musician André Marchand, it’s called “Les Matins de Bonny Doon.” Translated from the French, it means “Mornings at Bonny Doon.” This version, my personal favorite, is performed by the extraordinary violin-guitar duo, Lisa Ornstein and Dan Compton. Get yourself a cup of tea or coffee and close your eyes.
With that little bit of peace to set the tone, tonight I want to further explore the subject of dealing with enemies. In light of the current geopolitical situation, it seems an especially fitting topic.
I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to imagine what I would do if I were a world leader at this moment. For me, it’s much easier to think about such things on a smaller, more personal scale. You may recall that in our last issue, Love Explained (which came out on Valentine’s Day), I told the story of how, at the age of eight or nine, I dealt with a boy who chased me home from school…by clobbering him with a stick. I received quite a bit of feedback from readers who thought he got just what he deserved. And my sister, who was there when it happened, points out the boy was brandishing a piece of steel rebar (a fact I left out), and absolutely, he got what he deserved.
In his book, “Into the Magic Shop,” our teacher James Doty recounts a childhood incident that took place while he was having his first experiences with meditation. Doty had a hardscrabble life at home, with an alcoholic father and a clinically depressed mother. He was regularly accosted by a couple of neighborhood boys who enjoyed humiliating and beating up other kids. Usually, he found it impossible to defend himself. But on this day, with a few lessons from the Magic Shop under his belt, he cleared his mind, bounced on the balls of his feet a few times, and made up his mind to stand his ground. The bullies had to be stopped once and for all. Doty tells of standing with his arms at his sides, locking eyes with the bigger of the two bullies, and really seeing him for the first time. “I saw him, and he knew I saw him. I saw his pain and fear. A pain and fear that he tried to hide with his bullying.” When the bully saw that Doty wasn’t going to back down and might even be in the mood to fight back this time, he turned and walked away.
This is a story of what Buddhists call “fierce compassion.” When we come across people who are doing bad, hurtful things, it’s wrong to go along with them. They have to be stopped, or at least stood up to. That requires real courage, and sometimes forceful action. In Doty’s case, he didn’t even have to raise his fists. Looking at the bully with a clear-eyed gaze was enough to do the job. If Doty had decided to punch the bully before the bully could punch him (which is what I did to the boy who was chasing me), the message would have been much different. It would have been a message of hatred, and the damage the two boys did to each other would surely have been much greater and longer-lasting.
Both Jesus and the Buddha taught that we should love our enemies. For most of us mortals, that’s a tall order. What does love mean, after all? Love means wishing for the happiness of the beloved. Who has the grit (or the presence of mind) to wish their enemies were happier? Yet it makes an enormous amount of sense. Happy people don’t go around hurting others on purpose. Bullying is a game only sad, lonely people engage in. If you can look into your enemy’s eyes and see the sorrow and suffering behind the belligerence, then you don’t actually hate them anymore. Instead of seeing them as some sort of monster, you now see them as a person with problems that aren’t all that different from your own.
Buddhists call this the state of “non-hating.” When we move from thorough hatred to non-hating, that’s real progress! It’s not quite love, but it does require a little bit of compassion. And it’s something most of us mortals can actually achieve in this lifetime.
Here’s a little trick to use whenever you find yourself thinking of someone you “hate.” See if you can find one good thing about them. Don’t worry that you’re suddenly going to start overlooking their faults. You won’t. You’ll simply begin to see them as a complicated person. Enemies and villains aren’t complicated. They’re simple, two-dimensional cut-outs. Something I learned during my 50 years of writing fiction is that the best, most convincing bad guys are complicated. That’s because they’re more like the real people in our real lives. Nobody is all bad or all good.
When, at last, we can look at someone we despise and say truthfully, “He’s like me in some ways,” then we’re on our way to loving our enemy.
It’s been an eventful week, and I’m about out of steam. So I’ll sign off for tonight. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, right around the Ides of March! To teach us a little something about loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, here’s a school of anchovies swimming every which way without a single fight!