June 15th, 2006
A few nights ago, I sat down to the TV to see if there was anything on that I liked. Once the tube had warmed up, all I could find were talking heads and ten-year old sitcom reruns. Yes, sadly (or not), by the time I got a chance to watch the boob tube, it was past 11:00 and there was practically nothing but news and lame-ass jokes.
"Hmmph," I muttered, disturbing the cat and provoking her to answer back with meows, "I never seem to have any time these days to just sit and do nothing. So I wonder what swallows up all my free time, anyhow?"
And then, the day after that, I saw a quote that I smiled at, and proceeded to ignore:
One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy. - E.B. White
But wait! Harmonic convergence! I realised I shouldn't be ignoring this message, I should be taking it to heart; I haven't got the time I used to have because I don't know how to choose my battles in life. Ah, that's the problem: I have the tendency to call things as I see them, then worry about who it pisses off only afterwards. I know this, I am not proud of this, and I spend -er- copious amounts of time trying to deal with the fall out that comes from feeling incapable of keeping my mouth shut.
Great. Glad that's settled.
And, come to think of it, a boss in 1997 gave me this piece of advice mostly as a parting shot as I resigned to go on to bigger and better companies: "Choose your battles, Brian ... choose your battles." I didn't like being given advice that I thought was simple-minded (gawd, the irony of that) so I kind of shrugged it off, and I think that boss probably went back into his office and composed—in his mind, only—ever more intricate death-threat notes to me.
But I think that has been a characteristic of my life for ... well, forever, I think: I don't like letting little inaccuracies and bullshit moments go unchallenged in life—especially when I am somehow involved in them—and so I rise to address them, to the detriment of me and to the inciting of the derision of all other participants against me.
I don't have big enemies, but I go through life making dozens, maybe hundreds of little ones. And the maintenance on that lifestyle takes a lot of time and effort to just erect enough emotional barriers to avoid getting bloodied and bruised.
So I began a stream of thought along the lines that the boss who, in 1997, told me to choose my battles might very well be Righter than Rain. Maybe I should be inconsistent in my boy-scout-like insistence on brutal killing honesty. After all, we all have those mushy soft spots in our personalities anyway ... why fight it so much that the world becomes uniformly hostile (and homogeneously frustrating) when I could just choose a few of the big battles and let the small stuff slide like the proverbial water off the duck's back?
It was hardly a moment of religious fervour, but then I thought to myself, "Geez, why even pick those few battles? Why not throw out the baby, bathwater, bassinette, and bar of soap all at once and just stop battling the bullshit?" Armed with this thought I went to bed and slept long and hard, marveling that I have to keep rediscovering secrets in life just to be relatively happy.
* * *
Then, yesterday, my New Direction in Life snapped in two like a matchstick:
I met an old friend whom I had always admired for being able to withstand all the bullshit in the world with unflappable grace, and calm demeanour. He was the kind of man who quietly found the way out of the maze while the rest of us were arguing about whether we should follow the left wall or the right wall. He was the person who would stay silent during the height of the battle, then in a few words point out all that was important, ignoring the rest (and having that effect on us others as well). He was the pillar in the swirling chaos and he had no enemies, except (like the rest of us) time and taxes.
But yesterday he made a point of talking to me and telling me that, despite his self-knowledge of his kindness, calm, non-diminutive self-respecting non-bullshit quiet sensibility, he was ready to wring someone's thin chicken neck and tear their head off to use as a soccer ball. Instead of avoiding the battle, he was ready to pull out the sword and raise the shield to some worthless idiot.
Oh, believe me, I know this idiot, and I know just exactly what my friend means: A dangerous, stress-inducing, idiot is a hell on Earth. But this was the Great Calming Influence ready to explode into rage! What did this say about my little moment of catharsis about avoiding battles at all? Did it mean I was just spouting bullshit all my own? Did it mean that there is no life without some battles?
Yes, I believe it did. If we don't already acknowledge it, we really should: There are no absolutes in interpersonal relationships. When you are dealing with computers or cars, cake-baking or floor-scrubbing, drywalling or metal-working, you can make absolute rules about how to conduct yourself. But when it comes to people, you must sometimes throw on your helmet and make a stand. This is not out of some sense of survival, it is out of the balance between two opposites:
SURVIVAL: "Shut up; you can't win this fight; nobody cares, and they'll forget all about it soon enough; otherwise, you'll make yourself public enemy number one"
SELF-RESPECT: "You can't just sit and tacitly accept this shit; how can you let idiots get away with thinking their intelligence-insulting shit is fooling you?"
If it looks as though I have just made it look as though survival and self-respect are at opposite ends of some spectrum, you may (with more than a little justification) say I sound a bit like one of those university sophomores at 3:00 AM arguing what he thinks to be some secret of the universe, when really he is just thinking too black and white. I'd have to admit some truth to that, sure.
But things are not so dire if one stops thinking of "self-respect" as a good thing. And things get downright muddy and full of possibility if one acknowledges that it is not always the only necessity in life that we "survive" either:
SURVIVAL: "If I just keep sitting here letting this crap intrude and insult me more and more, I'm going to be left with no space to move and no air to breathe; I need to speak out now before I die from the encroachment of this shit"
SELF-RESPECT: "There's the saying, 'Never wrestle with a pig: You both get dirty and the pig likes it' and what does it say about me if I jump head-first into this moronic and ultimately inconsequential fight anyhow?"
Maybe survival and self-respect boil down to personal expression and the willingness to show it to others. Maybe the fighters of the world are perfectly happy to die by the sword, knowing that at least they had a taste of the way things could be. And maybe the people who act like throw-rugs (and get treated as such because of it) die in their lonely beds knowing that they traded in some parts of themselves gladly for the opportunity to see how the war turned out in the end.
And, I suppose, in the middle are the rest of us.
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