Live
and Let Live
“Each
man's life represents a road toward himself.”
Hermann
Hess
The
twelve-step groups have a familiar saying: “Live and let live.”
Seems simple enough on the surface—tend to your own business is the
short hand. I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time doing
that simple thing. I was genetically engineered from conception to
concern myself with other people, to comment and diagnose, to analyze
and recommend. It's not only in my blood, it's at least one strand of
my DNA. I come from a long line of meddlers.
It's
so much easier to look outward with these eyes and see the missteps
and blunders of others. Far more difficult to look inside and see
those same things in myself. My Native American teacher said it like this:
“As without, so within. As within, so without.” In other words,
what we see in others, both good and not so good, is a mirror image
of ourselves. We will see quite clearly in others what we need to
look at in ourselves. And further more, we will take what is within
us and project it onto others as though it belonged to them. We are a
complicated species. One not given to self-reflection.
A
deeper meaning of that 12-step saying is “keep your focus on
yourself.” Not in a self-absorbed, everything revolves around me
way, but in a “live your own life” way. Don't get down on
yourself. Shame is not a positive emotion. But neither is fretting
or worrying. Some of us have been schooled in the notion that if you
love someone, you worry about them. You spend your emotional energy
trying to figure out how to make them happy, and in the process, you
make yourself miserable. Love and worry are not bedfellows—they
don't even sit down at table together. Love and freedom, now that's a
passionate couple. And freedom extends to allowing that person we
love to do what they need to do, to make the mistakes they need to
make, and even to leave if they need to leave. It's hard. “Live and
let live,” may be the most difficult thing in the world for human
beings to do.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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