(no subject)
May. 4th, 2002 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnpalmerThis thought wasn't brought to mind by seeing Spiderman tonight, but it did kind of mesh with it. (A side note: Spiderman was *REALLY* well done. There was one minor difficulty with the accuracy, but, frankly, I think it's what they would have done if they'd started writing Spiderman today, rather than way back when.)
Recently, the idea of "power" has been on my mind.
When I think of "power", I think of things that a person can 'do'.
And that leads me back towards my general feeling about this... that the only real power is power over yourself.
The minute you try to go outside yourself, you lose control. What you can "do" becomes uncertain.
Recently, I had a friend who 'needed' to feel loved. Now, 'need' is a funny word here. I'm using it in this sense: if a person is in serious pain, and there are surplus painkillers, that person 'needs' painkillers. Will that person be damaged without them? Maybe not. But if someone was withholding those painkillers just for the hell of it, I'd be willing to fight that someone to get access to those painkillers.
Let me emphasize here that my example is not suggesting that this person was in pain. It's just the concept of "needing" pain relief is the kind of "need" I'll talk about. But, think about how "sex" is called a need. No one dies from a lack of sex, but, similar to the painkiller example, there are times people can and should fight for the right to engage in sex that doesn't harm others.
Anyway... a friend needed to feel loved. I didn't have the power to fill that need. This is an important thing to recognize.
Oh, I had the power to love my friend. I had the power to get myself to act a certain way that would probably be seen as loving. I have good empathy, and I have good knowledge about this friend... but nothing I did would necessarily make my friend feel loved. Not even if my friend *WANTED* to feel the love that was already there between us.
Only the things I do that affect me have any power... everything else gets diluted by what the universe is doing.
This creates a crazy balance. In one sense, you can't make people happy... in another, you know damn well that what you do can result in people being happy or unhappy.
So, what can you do? Well... you do your best.
And, you try to be a little detached. If you try to make people happy, and fail, you ask yourself "did I screw up in a way that I knew better?"
If so, then you think about how not to do that next time. If not, you try to let the frustration go, and hope that things work out better next time.
When Iwas Christian, this is a large part of what was attractive to Christianity. Jesus talked about the two great commandments: love God (which I took to mean "love that which is good", since it's God's goodness that might make him lovable), and love your neighbor. That doesn't mean "make them happy, always", it means "try to make them happy; work at making them happy". Do your best, in other words.
But it's a crazy balance. No one can deny that. You have to stand between controlling what you can do, and being out of control of everything else. After all, no matter how good your guesses are at what will make folks happy, you can always be wrong... and things can always get in your way. All you can be certain to affect (and not always perfectly) is you.
As luck would have it, I *DID* manage to end up with my friend feeling loved.
What's the point to this? Just that having this person feel loved was more real, and more important, than just about any other image of "power" that I have. Insofar as I helped bring about that feeling, I was truly and meaningfully powerful for a time.
And, I wanted to remind myself (and, indirectly, remind the readers of this journal) about that power for when darker times set in, and there's more a feeling of powerlessness than anything else.
Recently, the idea of "power" has been on my mind.
When I think of "power", I think of things that a person can 'do'.
And that leads me back towards my general feeling about this... that the only real power is power over yourself.
The minute you try to go outside yourself, you lose control. What you can "do" becomes uncertain.
Recently, I had a friend who 'needed' to feel loved. Now, 'need' is a funny word here. I'm using it in this sense: if a person is in serious pain, and there are surplus painkillers, that person 'needs' painkillers. Will that person be damaged without them? Maybe not. But if someone was withholding those painkillers just for the hell of it, I'd be willing to fight that someone to get access to those painkillers.
Let me emphasize here that my example is not suggesting that this person was in pain. It's just the concept of "needing" pain relief is the kind of "need" I'll talk about. But, think about how "sex" is called a need. No one dies from a lack of sex, but, similar to the painkiller example, there are times people can and should fight for the right to engage in sex that doesn't harm others.
Anyway... a friend needed to feel loved. I didn't have the power to fill that need. This is an important thing to recognize.
Oh, I had the power to love my friend. I had the power to get myself to act a certain way that would probably be seen as loving. I have good empathy, and I have good knowledge about this friend... but nothing I did would necessarily make my friend feel loved. Not even if my friend *WANTED* to feel the love that was already there between us.
Only the things I do that affect me have any power... everything else gets diluted by what the universe is doing.
This creates a crazy balance. In one sense, you can't make people happy... in another, you know damn well that what you do can result in people being happy or unhappy.
So, what can you do? Well... you do your best.
And, you try to be a little detached. If you try to make people happy, and fail, you ask yourself "did I screw up in a way that I knew better?"
If so, then you think about how not to do that next time. If not, you try to let the frustration go, and hope that things work out better next time.
When Iwas Christian, this is a large part of what was attractive to Christianity. Jesus talked about the two great commandments: love God (which I took to mean "love that which is good", since it's God's goodness that might make him lovable), and love your neighbor. That doesn't mean "make them happy, always", it means "try to make them happy; work at making them happy". Do your best, in other words.
But it's a crazy balance. No one can deny that. You have to stand between controlling what you can do, and being out of control of everything else. After all, no matter how good your guesses are at what will make folks happy, you can always be wrong... and things can always get in your way. All you can be certain to affect (and not always perfectly) is you.
As luck would have it, I *DID* manage to end up with my friend feeling loved.
What's the point to this? Just that having this person feel loved was more real, and more important, than just about any other image of "power" that I have. Insofar as I helped bring about that feeling, I was truly and meaningfully powerful for a time.
And, I wanted to remind myself (and, indirectly, remind the readers of this journal) about that power for when darker times set in, and there's more a feeling of powerlessness than anything else.
