It’s unusual to find myself being defended, much preferring to do it myself and with an efficiency to my own taste with a confidence in my own ability to deal with a situation in my control. Yet today, for the first time in a long time or at least for the first time in my own recollection as I sit here, I am being asked to put my faith in someone else defending me. I have to trust that they have my best interests at heart and I have to trust in the skill of their rhetoric to dismiss an individual entirely blind to his own shenanigans. It’s a test of friendship and love not just trust. In the end, the entire situation is out of my control, in fact I would have never have known about it if not for the courtesy.
It’s another test.
Another test of philosophy in the face of what I can and cannot control. I can only watch, provided courtesy of doing so, like a spectator watching a boxing match. It’s far more invasive than the casual observations like this. It’s like watching the news about the world and feeling that wish to be able to help but ultimately knowing that you can’t. Nothing can be done and you have to have faith in the universe as well as faith in the self that you will make the right choices in line with your nature and highest and greatest good for humanity.
Tonight’s topic was going to be about days and the illusion of bad days and good days. In the end, all we have are regular days that come one after the other and each day demands a little thing different for us to relinquish. Today, I am asked to relinquish my own conviction and integrity and allow an ally to hold those things in their hands. They have the power. Yet should things not go as I would prefer what would I lose? Aside from my temper – which is something that’s a constant work in progress.
“When someone does you wrong, you should consider immediately what judgement of good or evil led him to wrong you. When you see this, you will pity him, and not feel surprise or anger. You yourself either still share his view of good, or something like it, in which case you should understand and forgive: if, on the other hand, you no longer judge such things as good or evil, it will the easier for you to be patient with the unsighted.” – Meditations 7.26
I do pity the actor who I am being defended from. This person is making overtures to hide and deflect their own inadequacies and failings, something I can relate to. Yet, still I would be lying if my thoughts we not entirely dismissive of his intent good or bad, his execution so sloppy that if he were a surgeon he would have killed his patient twice over. The assassin of my name came armed with a plastic spoon. So what do I have to worry about? The faith in another is faith in the self, so surely as a person of a faith in self to do what is right here, why should I not trust my defender similarly?
It’s an unpleasant feeling, being this powerless for the most minor of things yet perhaps this is another thing to accept in itself as part of the natural endurance of what it means to be human. My own turbulent feelings wash over me about trust and who to trust and what to trust, questioning all things at all times and analysing a thing to its core. It’s a double edged sword that forces me to see a flaw in even the most perfect of diamonds and feel slighted by its existence as if my search to find that flaw wasn’t the intent in the first place. It’s a judgement for me to release, an impression of my own on another who has been perhaps as transparent as I have been in my wants and needs in the bond we share. The game of one-step-forward-two-steps-back is a game that I play with myself and tonight I have to trust, I have to face my own game and kick over the board or be locked into an emotional purgatory of pain and distaste.
As I was writing this I felt a tickle on my neck and a panic: a big furry caterpillar was crawling over me somehow attached to me undetected. I took it outside and put it in the hedgerow yet I think about what it’s telling me. I think about the metaphor in my hands of my own rebirth of perspective or rather the rebirth require of my own perspective.
“Amor fati, bitch,” it says, “Evolve: trust, love, accept.”
Z3N0
Z3N0 