Is someone going to despise me? That’s his concern. Mine is to see that I don’t do or say anything that deserves to be despised. Is someone going to hate me? That’s his concern. I’ll remain kind and benevolent to everyone. I’ll also be ready to show this particular kind of person what he’s overlooking, not harshly and not as a way of flaunting my patience, but genuinely and tactfully…
— MEDITATIONS 11.13
The younger version of me — the one who unabashedly belted out Joan Jett’s lyrics, first heard by me in Shrek — wasn’t internalizing a word of them. But I should have been.
There are days when I wish I could superglue my mouth, eyes, and ears shut because everything finds a way of getting under my skin. I doubt this is unique to me — everybody has bad days.
I bet there are even more days when the people around me wish they could superglue my mouth shut. I can be the agitator, not the agitated.
That is the diseased eye doing what it always does: the eye that cannot let a thing simply be what it is, that has to appraise it, rank it, check its reflection in the glass of other people’s regard. And it opens a harder question than should I let this go? The question is who the patience is for.
The way out is never a sharper reply. It is a change of framing.
Marcus was the most powerful person alive, despised daily and from every direction, and the calmness he fought and practiced for was found when he kept scale in proper perspective.
Much of what hurts us is only the size we have assigned to ourselves and our standing. Shrink that, and most of the insult has nowhere to land. Not numbness; proportion.
We stop confusing our reputation with our life.
That is the humility he is after, and it carries its own quiet test, because the performance of patience is the tell: real peace needs no audience to confirm it, and when the calm has to be witnessed, there is none underneath.
It is ordinary, and it is everywhere:
It is the relationship where one person keeps a ledger of how graciously they have absorbed the other’s faults.
It is the meeting where the calm voice is calm precisely so the room will note who stayed calm.
It is the apology pitched at a volume the offended party was never meant to be the only one to hear.
Each time, the same substitution: a person who ought to be looking outward is looking into a mirror instead, grading their own composure, waiting for the verdict to come back kind.
The verdict is the whole problem. We keep handing our conduct to a room that was never the judge and reads us wrong as often as right. Clear sight starts the moment we stop. Set the contempt down where it belongs — squarely in the other person’s keeping — and an astonishing amount of attention comes back, free to spend on the only thing that was ever ours: what we actually do, and whether it would still be good with no one watching.
Onwards.