The
Hell of High School
“Life
isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.”
Eckhart
Tolle
In a
phone conversation last night, my friend Anna and I talked about bullying. About
how it can cripple people for life if they do not have a strong sense of self
to counter it. I wonder what makes humans so mean. Do you ever think about
that? What satisfaction do we get out of making hateful comments about other
people just because we can? When I was a child, we made snarky remarks about others,
too. Of course, we didn’t have social media to castigate someone anonymously
24/7, but we certainly managed to hurt a lot of feelings. I remember making a
nasty comment that was reported in the school newspaper (much to my
embarrassment) about a young woman who was new to our school. She was different
in that she bleached her hair and wore it bouffant at a time that was not the
style, but mostly, she was dating my former boyfriend, and I was jealous. I
wonder whether jealousy and competition are driving some of the over-the-top
bullying we hear about today.
If you are
being bullied right now, I would say to you, “Hold on.” High school doesn’t
last forever. Five years from now you will not even know the people who bully you now. They will only be a footnote in your discarded journal. I know it is hard,
because I’ve been there, and people were often hateful to me, too. It helps to
concentrate on the folks who are good to you—your family, hopefully, and your
friends. A wise counselor once told me to put those hateful folks on a raft and
send them down the river, and that has been an image I have used many times
over the years. In your mind, just stick them on a raft and cut the rope. Wave
as they float away.
Life is
serious business, but not all of it is as important as we make it out to be. I
am learning not to counter barbs slung at me, even though something in me wants
to. I try not to encourage those barbs by becoming defensive, or escalate the
nastiness by snarking back, though sometimes I do in spite of myself. I ask
myself, and you can too, how much does this person really mean to me? In the
big scheme of things, will I even remember them ten years from now? If the answer
is ‘no’ then I can simply ignore them. Remember this, when you let someone get
under your skin, you give them a little bit of power over you. Thus, the
saying, “get a thicker skin.”
I don’t
understand why we are so mean to each other. As someone told me recently, “we
are a naturally aggressive species.” Like an alligator, we have the same lizard
brain and some of us live there. But we can still concentrate on what is good, what is precious. We can
still be filled with wonder and awe at the beauty of the natural world. Seek
those things first. Immerse yourself in them. Here’s some encouragement from
that ancient Sufi master, Rumi: “Stop acting so small. You are the universe
in ecstatic motion.” Amen, and amen.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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