The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [20]
“Consider how much more pain is brought on us by the anger and vexation caused by such acts than by the acts themselves at which we are angry and vexed.”
Try to get the person to see that people, like bees, ought to work together, and be kind to the person. “But you must do this not in irony or by way of rebuke, but with kindly affection and without any bitterness at heart, not as from a master’s chair, nor yet to impress the bystanders.”5
Then Aurelius offers “a tenth present”: that “to expect bad men not to do wrong is madness,” and that to see that they cheat, betray, and gossip about others, and imagine that they won’t behave this way toward you, is irrational. You knew they did it to other people, and you tolerated it. Now that you know they talk about you, which you should have guessed all along, you should tolerate that, too. Bertrand Russell made a fine point of this, also, noting the indignant amazement of those who have learned of talk about them. “It has apparently never occurred to them that, just as they gossip about everyone else, so everyone else gossips about them.”6
When you hear that so-and-so has said something horrid about you, you remember the ninety-nine times when you have refrained from uttering the most just and well-deserved criticism of him, and forget the hundredth time when in an unguarded moment you have declared what you believe to be the truth about him. Is this the reward, you feel, for all your long forbearance? Yet from his point of view your conduct appears exactly what his appears to you; he never knows of the times when you have not spoken, he knows only of the hundredth time when you did speak.7
Letting go of the desire for revenge or recompense, difficult as it may be, is actually easier than getting satisfaction through exacting revenge. Spinoza explained that “[h]e who wishes to avenge injuries by hating in return does indeed live miserably. But he who, on the contrary, strives to drive out hatred by love, fights joyfully and confidently, with equal ease resisting one man or a number of men, and needing scarcely any assistance from fortune. Those whom he conquers yield gladly, not from defect of strength, but from an increase of it.”8 These are striking sentences. Even if you cannot find any other reason to meet rudeness with generosity, Spinoza has told us one that is hard to reject: you will win in the long run without almost any need for luck. The woman in your office who gave you the silent treatment for a year for no reason beyond envy, a fact acknowledged even by her friends, may have brought real stress into your life. You want her to suffer. But you don’t really know what to wish for along those lines, other than massive success on your part or some fine shame for her. That would need luck. Instead, imagine that you choose to act with a strong good heart, reminding yourself that you can be above such injury and a model of virtue, and at the same time remembering that you, too, have faults, and that somewhere along the line you probably hurt this little monster’s feelings. Maybe you didn’t do much: she took your social discomfort for personal rejection. Or maybe you look like her judging mother. If you do win her over, it may be because she has learned something, even by watching you, even without knowing it. This way, when you win, she is more humane, not less, and you are more humane, and the world is more humane. Anyway, as Koheleth tells us in Ecclesiastes, “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools” (Eccles. 7:9). With friends, you do not have to forgive them all. You can break away from someone who has hurt you, but if your head tells you to forget it but your feelings won’t, try these forgiveness techniques, and think of it as a personal goal to work past your anger. As for family, you have to keep trying to forgive them, for your own sake. There is no way out of this one, because holding a grudge against family is exhausting and never ending, whereas by working to forgive them you can at least relax