Why is it hard for so many people to control their appetites? I came across an interesting theory, proposing that it's the result of natural selection.[1] What we want the most, the theory goes, is what's hardest to find. Those earlier hominids that went for the big calories and rare nutrients like fats and salts instead of low-cal, common veggies when they had the chance, were more likely to live to fight another day, and also have sex later, and pass those proclivities on to the next generation. So when you're looking through the pantry, an ancient voice in the back of your brain, passed down through the long eons before the rise of Nabisco, whispers, There will always be broccoli, but this may be the last Oreo you ever see… The traits we want the most in ourselves are the hardest to find.
The same, I think, is true of empathy, and calm, and many other things: what we want the most is the hardest to find – in ourselves and in others, too.
I was reminded of this recently. Someone I know seemed to be working really hard to pick a fight with me, and it pissed me off enough that I was just about to give it to him.
My friend Benton kicked my butt about it. "What do you think he's going through?" he demanded.
Yes. Right. Like I said, empathy is hardest to find when you need to find it the most. And failing that, mellowness.
This is one of the realizations that spills over the side when someone practices meditation.
One sultry night in Bangkok many years ago, just before the turn of the millennium, I was hanging out with the sister of a friend of mine, and his young nephew. My friend – let's not mince words here – couldn't be trusted. Still, she kept him on at her shop, selling trinkets and little statues at the market down by the Jao Praya River.
"He steals from me," she told me.
"Then why is he still working for you?"
"To teach me Odtoan," she said.
Sensing my confusion, she whispered to her little son, "Pretend to annoy me."
The boy danced around her and made little mocking gestures while trying not to giggle.
Awn closed her eyes and held up her hand in the gesture that, in the US, means "stop." It means "stop" in Thai Buddhist iconography, too – but, as a gesture of the Buddha's, in a much deeper, longer-lasting sense.
Odtoan: patience, forbearance, endurance, tolerance. Important virtues if one wants to find peace, as Buddhists think of it.
How she measured the value of patience against the loss of merchandise I don't know. (After I returned to the US, she did send her brother to a monastery for a season, to improve himself.) But the emotions and states of mind that loosen tensions require practice.
It wasn't until I'd been meditating for several years that that revelation spilled into awareness. I began to see how much discipline it takes to not get angry, to make use of empathy and calmness to defuse tense situations – to be care-free. It can take more discipline than a person can muster sometimes.
And because the currents of our culture push us so quickly toward individualism and taking personal responsibility, it can be hard to ask for those things from others.
But I think Awn was right, in a round-about way: we do inherit these feelings - empathy, mellowness, anger, frustration, and many others - from the people around us. (I hesitate to say learn – these are often nothing other than emotional reactions.) Sometimes it's an intentional response to an irresponsible brother, but often we also experience them by mirroring the way others feel. This is all part of an environment of circulating feelings
What people want the most can be the hardest to find in those environments - but sometimes practice does help.
Notes:
[1] This comes from a secondary source I taught in my days at UCSD, a book called Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect, by Paul Ehrlich (published Penguin Books in 2002), p. 287.