indifference

During a discussion the other day I brought up a bit of pop wisdom, possibly attributable to Elie Wiesel: "The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference."

Yes, this is the kind of thing I talk about at work. On good days, anyway.

Aside from the pleasurable way it illustrates the slippery nature of the word "opposite" (whence much of my frustration with standardized testing), this quote has some truth to it, at least for high-temperature-emotion folks.

I insert that last qualification about emotional temperature to be fair to a colleague who approached me after the discussion. He wanted to dispute the opposition of love and indifference. He wanted to claim that some forms of love do not have strong opinions. Perhaps he even wanted to imply that a benign indifference can be the most enlightened form of love.

This got me thinking about Buddhism, and the concept of Nirvana, which has been characterized as "detachment" or "non-attachment." What brings freedom from suffering, by the Buddha's Third Noble Truth, is the cessation/destruction of craving/attachment to things that will fade away.

As a teenager raised in the Christian tradition, I heard this as a cop-out. Detaching from the world means ignoring the goodness of creation, right? It means an end to love and passsion and activism, right? After watching "Gone With the Wind" I decided to make my mission statement: "Give a darn" (or variously more vulgar forms of that basic idea--probably not the right idea to get from the movie, but that Scarlett was GORGEOUS).

Well, as I got older I came more to appreciate emotional restraint again. And as I got to know more actual Buddhists, and not just what I imagined about them from superficial reading, I came to see that there could be such a thing as peaceful, non-grasping love which authentically is unashamed to be who I am, and also unanxious to let the beloved be whomever they might happen or need to be without trying to fix them. Infinitely curious, and infinitely generous, but not heated or needy.

This is not what my colleague is like.

He claims to have no fixed opinions and to be willing to go where people need him to be in a Zen-without-being-aware-of-it sort of way, but it is so inauthentic. He is an anxious person who is never seems to listen to others who don't already agree with him. He is unable to understand anything that is not already inside his head. And he appears so wounded when you contradict him in the least possible way that a nice person is inclined to avoid contradicting him at all. So he gets to avoid all conflict.

I remember, at a time in my life when I was extremely inexperienced with relationships and with leadership of all sorts, that I felt a sense of smug superiority over folks who had to have things their own way, or who had such strong opinions that they could not fully participate in a discussion by being persuadable. I felt pride in my flexibility. I have since come to learn that while this attitude has distinct advantages, it also manifests itself as poor leadership or a failure to engage fully in conversation. If I just claim that anything goes, then there is nothing to say, or to do. And the pushy jerks always win.

And my worst sin was this: I didn't know that many of my opinions were just as rigid and fixed as the ones in others that I complained about. And I was so inauthentic about it. This is what I see as the soul of "emotional dimwittage" (to bowlderize Bridget Jones): to be so unaware of oneself and one's baggage as to see it as an advantage, and to attempt to recruit others to the same crippled lack of self-understanding that you are a victim of, or to run others' lives by your baggage, as if you alone know the One True Path to happiness when you in fact don't even know how to make yourself happy without damaging others along the way.

Much better, then, to seek to know oneself, to seek to express oneself, and to stand for things one is actually passionate about. As long as you don't clench them in a destructively rigid way.

Non-attachment is not the same thing as indifference, and not-caring is not love. Of course, hot passion is not the only game in town, either. Why not wry amusement, generous attentiveness, and play?

Lunch was multiple courses of fast food: I fed my boys McDonalds Happy Meals so they could have the Spider-Man toys before school began. I had a grilled honey mustard snack wrap for myself and mooched a few fries and nuggets from them. Then I met more of my family at Culver's, where I had a double Butterburger with everything, including cheese and endless drippings of finger-lickin' condiments, crinkle fries, ketchup, Diet Pepsi, and finally as dessert a scoop of the flavor of the day custard: chocolate caramel nut.