Sidestepping

Sometimes I struggle with feelings of overwhelming dislike. Especially for those people whose negative sphere of influence touches my daily life. You know, the neighbor who doesn’t curb their dog when walking across my yard; the colleague who makes snide, snarky comments and looks, not for where I’ve performed well, but for where I’ve messed-up. The alcoholic landlord who curses at my kids, sneers her lip and calls me a “breeder;”  the former best friend who betrayed my trust. Sometimes, when I feel this person’s presence, I just want to vomit. I want to punch, kick, scream and maim. Twist something clean and pure into a misshapen tangle with a jagged end and use it as a throwing spear.

            But I won’t. Because what does that violence of mood and thought serve? It would only boomerang as violence directed at myself. It will set me several steps backwards – outside of myself and weakened as a result. So I strap into my dignity. I let the person who is trying to bully me into submission stand in her lonely corner and shadow box. She can throw punches at her imaginary foe – because that foe is not me. Not any longer. For a foe connotes a relationship of some kind. An emotional tether that binds two people together - even in animosity or malice, or mutual feelings of repugnance, disregard and distaste. Repugnance is an unfortunate way to relate to someone, but it is a “way” nonetheless. To have an enemy, then, is to remain tied to that person in perpetual relationship precisely because you continue to relate to them.

So, I have to choose to stop relating. I am not in relationship with the strangers who pass me in their cars on the highway. I am not in relationship with the people who answer customer service lines. I am not even in relationship with the anonymous bank teller who assists me in financial transactions – an activity that could be fraught with emotional charge if my account balance feels skinny, or if the bank has inadvertently misplaced that incoming wire. In that kind of an exchange, I would most assuredly be emotional, and an emotional reaction to a person – even if fleeting – could sometimes be misconstrued as relating.

Ultimately, though, I am not in relationship with these people because at the bitter end I am indifferent to their moods, their needs and their wants. They are simply just one of many stars in the universe, just one miniscule fleck of dust. A single droplet of water that is identifiable and distinctly separate from a larger body of water only in this one brief, momentary transaction. If I step back from the canvas and look through a wider lens, I will see that this particular moment will pass and that the individual identity of the person standing in front of me will, in short time, step back into the stream of life once again and merge into the broader brushstroke of cumulative ALL. Once that happens, I will no longer be able to identify her as distinct because she will have been absorbed into the greater canvas. The people in their cars will pass me to the point of no return, as will the customer service operators whose string of unending, subsequent calls will place mine – which had at first felt so pressing and urgent - into complete obscurity and absolute irrelevance.

There it is! Absolute irrelevance!

In time, my passion - my troubled heat, as it were -  is just as inconsequential as the next person’s passion, so why let my blood boil? Why let my thoughts become violent thunderclouds? Those ugly, negative thunderclouds are only storming up my personal landscape and I sure as hell don’t want to fuck up my own picnic plans.

This doesn’t mean I can’t dislike someone, though, or feel a lack of respect for what they do or do not do, or how they choose to treat me and others. Some people are worthy of dislike. In my personal code of ethics, there are, indeed, people who just don’t qualify as good, trustworthy folks. I find them mean, covetous, small-minded. But I can choose instead to care a little less about those people, even when it’s me they have targeted in their scope. I can step around them. I can shrug my shoulders. I can flick their influence from me with as little thought as I might flick the life from a flea.

All of this may make me terribly cold and unfeeling. Hard-edged, even inhumane. And so be it – at least for this moment. I’ll just let that thought sit there in its bare-nakedness, twisting in the wind like some forlorn piece of grey and tattered laundry pinned to a line.

I am cold and unfeeling. I am hard-edged. I am inhumane.

But I know that, really, I am none of those things. I may adopt those unflinching characteristics as the temporary means to an end. So that I can survive an ugly, painful exchange that must be endured. So that I can sort out how to negotiate a working relationship with a petty, hen-pecking colleague. So that I can remain above the scurvy and meanness of ending a legal contract that was once borne of shared intent but has now turned rancid and, as such, must be - has to be - rendered moot.

And then maybe, once that contract is moot - a thing of the past - then maybe at that moment I can step back into a gentler, more humane way of perceiving the same person I once considered a potential foe. Perhaps then I can consider her/him/they/them as something else – a simple formula, really: another fellow, another person, another being, struggling to find the right fit, the right way, the right self-expression. And that person, though once an influence in my life, has no more impact on me than the driver of an anonymous car passing me on the highway. I don’t have to struggle with notions of like or dislike for that person. With feelings of malintent or insecurity or perceived threat. Why would I? For that person is a harmless stranger and she can go peacefully along her way, just as I can be left to go peacefully along mine.