I recently enjoyed a lovely stay with a few friends over the weekend. One of my hosts offered a simple yet piercing piece of wisdom about acceptance that prompted me to write this blog.
After a grueling year, I decided last fall to purchase an expensive big tv. My ex had taken our tv, and (I’m guessing) partly as an effort to reclaim autonomy I bought a few nice things to facilitate a new beginning in my life, e.g. quality knives, dinnerware, tv. The functional items that contributed to a healthy lifestyle were easy to justify and retain; however, I was hung up on the tv purchase. Did I really need a big expensive tv? Wouldn’t that just encourage unskillful behavior? I had been steadily decreasing my tv/gaming time, and didn’t want to disrupt the trend. Some amount is fine of course, but too much is, well, too much. I kept the tv new and boxed as I moved out to Raleigh, not sure what to do with it.
Unfortunately, aside from the potential effects on my life choices, there was a far more annoying poke in the back of my brain that begged the question: “What will others think of me if they come to my house and see a nice big tv? Will that tank my Buddhist cred? Will I be seen as just another technology-driven American zombie?” Though certainly not the most pressing problem to focus on, admittedly this ended up being a more persistent tug on my mind.
I shared some of these musings with one of my hosts, and he replied with a simple bit of wisdom that spoke volumes. He said, “Look Jon, they’re going to find something to judge you about.”
In thinking about it, of course he’s correct. We need to accept that people have beliefs and opinions, and that they will in all likelihood not entirely align with our own. You can seemingly have total alignment on a given issue, but if you dig deep enough, odds are that you’ll find something you disagree on. This shouldn’t be surprising, but when that area of disagreement arises (and I’ll cop to this too), often we react with “What? You think WHAT???”
We all came to where we are today walking a different path than the person next to us. We might live in the same city but went to a different school. We might have attended the same school but went to different classes. We might have attended the same classes but grew up in different households. We might have had divorced parents but one of them got divorced at an early age. It’s never going to be the same!
Within my field of animal rights (AR), I often see people struggling to understand why someone else doesn’t agree with their seemingly obviously correct viewpoint. Whether it’s criticism for someone not inquiring about the ingredients in the vegetable stew from the buffet, or accusations of siding with the enemy when a group advocates for welfare reforms, AR advocates tend to harbor a lot of judgments about other AR advocates (though interestingly, the AR movement as a whole is extremely tolerant and accepting and supporting outside of AR). These judgments interfere with our ability to make progress.
Within advocacy, when we cast aside aligned parties from a perceived lack of value alignment due to less-stringent standards, we are weakening our ability to create the change we *all* wish to see. We must recognize that our own views are changing all the time, that we didn’t always hold the beliefs that we do today, and that it was a system of causes and conditions that led to our current worldview. You had to have the specific brain chemistry and environmental circumstances to adopt your views, and the other person in your group didn’t have those, period.
Far from being exclusive to group membership, this need for understanding applies to interpersonal relationships as well. Do you find yourself without many long-term friends, often bouncing from friend to friend? Do you crave deeper relationships? Yes, it’s possible that moving on from certain friends is the right call—you might have grown apart, or the relationship might have soured, or you might have matured in a substantive way. But another explanation is that you might be stuck in the habit of discarding those people in your life who start to show their cracks as you get to know them. This happens especially easily if your view of people is one of utility, of how they can be useful to you. Take a close look at the reasons that your relationships have fallen by the wayside over time, and you might find that you haven’t been accepting of minor differences that ultimately don’t matter.
This applies to romantic partners as well, perhaps especially. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone romantically for the first five months after separating from my wife, but have been thinking about relationships a lot recently. As you might imagine with someone who just ended a ten-year marriage, my thoughts center around what went wrong there, what mistakes I made, and how I can choose more wisely in the future. To be clear I know my divorce was the right decision, but that doesn’t stop me from reflecting on these questions. And from wondering what is most important to me in a relationship, what would be a dealbreaker, and what would be tolerable if not ideal.
With romantic relationships, these questions feel especially important, as you will be getting to know the other person at a deep level. The more you get to know them, the more you will inevitably find some aspects of their lives that you don’t understand. Why does she do that? Why doesn’t he consider this? The questions will mount the longer you are together. If you’re the one relationship on the planet where you agree with your partner 100% on every single thing each other does, then congratulations I’m happy for you and your partner. In reality this is rarely the case.
As you learn more about your partner or prospective partner, observe any reactivity. Watch for aversion to arise, watch for anger or disdain to arise, and when they do, ask the question: “What is the attitude of the mind?” This question leads to other important questions: “Are we being accepting, or are we judging? Do we expect them to adore every aspect of our own tendencies and preferences? Does any of this really matter?”
One of the ironies of life is that many of us learn how to be happy as we get older, but then we’re older and don’t have much time left to live out the lessons we’ve picked up along the way. As a currently single mid-life divorcee, you might question my ability to give good advice here, but hear me out. After all, you pick up a lot of lessons from a ten-year failed marriage, and as I wrote earlier, the divorce was the right decision at the end of the day. And some of us seem to like to learn lessons the hard way, through direct experience.
A relationship needs to meet the non-negotiable needs of each party. It also needs to be built on a foundation of love and respect for the other person as they are, not as you wish them to be. Thomas Merton once wrote: “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” Ask yourself the question, am I just looking for a mirror of myself? Do I want to see my partner as they are, or do I want to see my reflection in their eyes?
If you truly love another, then you accept them, the whole package, full stop. And if you love another person for who they are, then when evaluating an undesirable aspect, you can go back to the foundation of the relationship. This enables you to see just how important that aspect actually is, and whether or not a change is needed. I *need* my partner to be open-minded, veg, empathetic, and health-oriented, but I don’t need my partner to like the same music, cars, or podcasts. We might not love a specific behavior, but we can accept that we’re all different in various ways and that in fact, that’s what makes each person special. Otherwise they’d just be you with a different body! I don’t know about you, but I’m not keen to be in a relationship with myself. Yet this is the very way that we tend to react when we find something we don’t like; we act as if we want the other person to be the same as us. We set up walls instead of building bridges.
Now of course, there are good reasons to end relationships. But we need to accept that we will find something we don’t like, eventually, and when we do, we can ask that question “What is the attitude of the mind?” at that moment. If we’re judging and reacting, we can dig deeper and see whether or not the thing we don’t like actually merits a response of some kind. If our attitude is one of love and acceptance, but we still find something to be problematic, then we can bring the issue up and see if there’s a way forward or if it’s time to move on.
In keeping with the earlier tv theme, a few years ago I was visiting my ma and I noticed that the old large wooden entertainment stand looked a little awkward with the current tv setup. It was originally built to house a 29” CRT television, but since today’s screens are wider, that meant only a much smaller tv could fit there. This looked especially awkward given the larger size of the room. As I started detailing how I could modify it and move around some sections, my ma eventually had enough and kindly informed me: “Jay (my family name), you don’t have to *fix* everything in my life!” For better or worse, this is a tendency that I have to watch for; I always want to help but my help is not always appropriate or needed or even desired. Similarly, we don’t need to *fix* everything that doesn’t fit our ideal model of a group or friend or partner. We need to be there for them if they need us, with love and openness and acceptance, but that’s it.
I brought my own tv issue up with a different close friend recently, and she had a wiser focus than my concerns of others’ judgment. She said, “Well, the real question is, do you think this will increase undesirable behavior?” A simple point, but it cuts to the heart of what matters—not how someone else will judge you, but whether or not you are living your life in accord with your values, with your own personal mission statement. Living our lives as a way of meeting others’ expectations or gaining their approval is a shadow of what life is meant to be. What’s worse, the more that we make choices with those types of goals in mind, the more often we’ll travel that same thought path in the future, and before you know it we’re deciding what shirt to wear based on what others might want to see. Little things matter.
Relationships are complicated. You need support, you need understanding, and, in the case of romantic relationships, a love that transcends tomorrow’s wrinkles and sagging skin. You need a willingness to be with what is, and what will be. Our differences can be celebrated, as it’s our unique perspectives that make us special in the first place, and none of us are immune to the changes that come with time. There are good reasons to part ways, but don’t trust your initial reactivity; investigate. Ask questions and explore, and retain an open mind to whatever you’re experiencing. By doing so, we can find and keep relationships—whether membership in a group, as a friend, or as a partner—that enrich our lives in countless ways.
Stay real with each other, everybody.