The music I tend to listen to has one unifying factor— it’s usually pretty awesome to sing to in one way or another. I love memorizing songs and singing them when I clean or cook. I feel like it makes a home happy to have music in it, and it helps keep my attention focused on my tasks and not the million other things that I need to do later. So Patty Griffin started coming up on my Spotify radios, and I loved it immediately. “Long Ride Home” was the first one I had heard, and this lyric in it hit me so powerfully that sometimes it even invokes tears when I am thinking about a particularly regretful action or statement. As a social worker, I’m trained not to respond to baiting and to rise above poor behavior to continue to support and advocate for that client. As a person, I feel compelled to put my opinion out in the arena with everyone else’s. So when my personal relationships become stressful or reach a rough patch, I often feel at odds within myself.
I know how I would handle it in a professional setting, and I know how I would LIKE to handle it in a purely personal and uneducated way. Personally, I’d love to deliver a thorough tongue-lashing that ends with tears and me pumping my fist in victory over the broken bodies of my foes… But that doesn’t really go over well unless your intent is to burn all your bridges. So then I have to pivot- how can I communicate what I need while maintaining civility and reason? And after much thinking about why that was so hard and why I hated doing it so much, I came to the great and obvious conclusion- PRIDE. It’s hard to put aside your pride and your need to be right or to win, and to work on finding a solution instead of finding a winner. Purely pride and ego that get in the way of honest communication. So at the end of the day, if I’m the “winner” of the fight and the only thing I can curl up with at night is my pride… Then what did I really win?
So I heard this lyric and started to think about what it was really costing me to be kind or supportive or generous. It cost me the smug feeling of victory over my fellow man, and the unrelenting heat of competition. It cost me my anger- How could I hold on to it when I chose to move forward with compassion instead of righteousness? It cost me my paranoia, and the constant need to ensure that I was the best out of everyone, everywhere, every time. And by allowing all that shit to flow out of my life, I was able to replace it with compassion, understanding, forgiveness, and peace. At the end of my life, no matter when it occurs, I want to be able to look back and say that I gave as generously and as fully as the universe gave to me. I want to go with the certainty that I did the best I could and people out there were better for it.
Naive? Maybe.
A worthy pursuit? Absolutely.