IT CAN'T BE ME

Years ago I struck up a causal friendship with a woman I met through mutual friends. On the third or fourth time I saw her, she called her husband an idiot. I knew in that moment that she and I wouldn't go on to be friends. Her saying that and having no qualms about it was a signal to me of a very different sensibility, someone not very "evolved", someone who had little compassion. I know I was making a lot of assumptions based on that one word, but we send each other signals like that all the time.and over time I've learned to trust my instincts.
    A few weeks later, I was having a meal with our mutual friend who told me the other woman, sensing that I'd pulled away, wondered if the reason was that I was jealous because she was married. It made me laugh. Her husband did come into it, but not in the way she thought.
    This is a good example of something all of us do, sometimes repeatedly. We defend ourselves  - the problem can't be me so it must be the other -  she must be jealous or intimidated or something else.  It's always a self-serving reason, something that leaves us with  a certain superiority and allows us to walk away with no hint of being disliked and rejected.
     I notice I haven't been doing that for a good long time. I can only think it's because my confidence has grown, my ego isn't so tender. It gets easier to say, well, maybe she doesn't like me when I know that thought isn't going to crush me.  My fear of rejection used to make me interpret every look as a signal of dislike and rejection; I saw everywhere the thing I was most afraid of. But age and whatever self-knowledge I've learned on the path, as I've struggled through the events and ideas that caused deep seated pain, have helped me through the fear of rejection, the fear that I'll never be good enough, the fear that I'll never have what I want or find a way to express all I feel inside me. The fear that I'll never be a  combination of Susan Sontag and Audrey Hepburn, which I have secretly always wanted to be.  Most of the time the camera in the ceiling which was always judging me, the self-consciousness that came from all that fear - most of time it's gone. I can stay in the moment and go through the day without constantly assessing what the world thinks of me. I can just be who I am with all my faults and mistakes and lack of self-discipline. I'm no longer the victim of my deeply threatened ego and if someone doesn't like me  I remind myself of all the times I was the one who walked away. It's the way of the world. It's what it means to be human.
   

SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, etal.

I've been reading a book called At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It's about the philosophers Sartre, Beauvoir and their circle during and after WWII - their lives, existentialist philosophy and more than a few affairs.
     Here's a long quote by Bakewell:

Freedom for (Sartre) lay at the heart of all human experience...as a human being I have no predefinednature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course, I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

   Sartre put this principle into a slogan: Existence precedes essence....roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on the create my own definition (or nature, or essence)...you might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that it is the human condition from the moment of first-consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom, no more, no less.

   I, Sherry, can see that if I alone create myself from what I do, I have a responsibility to act in such a way that I will want to be the person I'm always becoming. My actions will reveal who I am. No philosophy or religion or politics or other person can tell me what to do; I am the only one who can make my choices.

     What a responsibility! I can already feel anxiety. Will I make the right or the wrong choice? I think Sartre would say there is no right or wrong. There is only what we do which will lead to the next action and the next. 

     So Buddhist, so 21st century. Bakewell thinks it could be that existentialism will make a comeback. It seems to me that its ideas are already here.

     More about responsibility another time.