September 1975
By: B. M. | Saratoga, California
When we cannot suffer others, we are the ones who suffer
MY TENDENCY to find other people irritating and objectionable because they have faults has long been a source of discomfort to me. I am annoyed even when those faults are causing me no real inconvenience. I seem to take noticeable personality flaws–not only those of my intimate associates, but those of casual acquaintances–as a personal affront, which I resent.
On first reading the Big Book, I noted the advice about looking upon people who behaved badly toward oneself as “sick” persons. But my answer to the implied question “You wouldn’t get angry at a sick person, would you?” was a resounding “Yes, I would!” I not only would; I often did. My feeling was that other people’s being sick was a nuisance, often to me, and making trouble for me constituted sheer naughtiness. My intellect saw reason in what the Big Book said; there was no rational argument against the proposition that one ought not to get mad at people because of their emotional deformities and afflictions, any more than for their physical weaknesses. It went back to a much older quotation, “To understand all is to forgive all.”
But, until recently, my theoretical comprehension of these passages in the Big Book had little apparent effect on the feelings entrenched by the habits of a lifetime. Now a long sea voyage has helped to bring my emotional responses into focus. For three months, I have traveled on two different ships, each carrying no more than twelve passengers. At times, there have been no more than six or eight persons aboard, and as some debarked and others came on, there have been frequent changes in the composition of our “family.”
I have become very fond of and enjoyed greatly a few of these two dozen or so shipmates; some have aroused practically no reaction; and a few still bring a tightening of the lips, a drawing together of the brows, and a mean feeling. Not, you understand, that any of these unfortunate souls committed any foul deeds or inflicted any injury upon me. All they did was clutter up the atmosphere with their imperfections.
One pair was crude and uncultured and gross; in addition, the female of it made the mistake (without knowing I was a member of AA) of speaking derisively about a friend of theirs who had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and had immediately (according to the narrator) tried to stop everyone else from drinking. As time went on, I saw why the friend had, in his newness on the program, tried to “help” this couple!
Another man aroused my critical intolerance by bringing a brandy bottle into the lounge after dinner every evening, brandishing it about, and urging everyone to partake of it. When he said one day, “I’m going to make a drunken cruise out of this yet!,” he went on my enemies list. Immoderate drinking habits are the shortest cut to landing on this list.
But just plain flaws of any kind can do it. One pair was so vacuous, so dumb, so boring that I felt cross every time I looked at them. One woman was so soft and squashy and unrealistically sentimental and affected that I felt like being unnaturally coarse to counteract her. Another has a taut, sharp-tongued, I-have-to-be-right-all -the-time air, which makes me glower and try to think up ways to put her down.
As a result, I suppose, of years of continuous (though often dilatory) taking of my own inventory, I have begun to recognize what I am doing when I become angry because people among whom I have to live are not what I would like them to be. I have even perceived the damage I do to my own mental condition by being constantly annoyed at the deficiencies of others. Perhaps I have finally seen this more clearly because I know that my present relationships are only for a limited period, which I want to enjoy and which I won’t if I am in poor physical or mental health. I have tried to glimpse what I do that prevents me from getting the most out of the pleasurable circumstances available in this circumscribed amount of time.
Life here is reined in to a slower pace, narrowed to a handful of people, and shut off from the confusing and frightening larger scenes of community and world affairs. (In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we don’t even get news.) So it has been easier for me to recognize what the particular reactions I have recounted are, and to accept the need for change. If I had not had this long and leisurely respite from the hurried, busy, demanding situations of ordinary working life on shore, it might have taken more time and effort to see even this much about my life-style of constant anger at people who have the effrontery to parade around in front of me in ugly psychological apparel.
Actually, what harm does it do me personally if, for instance, some people drink so much that they never see the sun set or the moon rise on the sea? I can appreciate those sights, whether they do or not. If they are boors or bores, vapid romanticists or mean-tempered cynics, what is it to me? Are they not, by their very shortcomings, providing an absorbing spectacle of human nature in action?
Many years ago, I read some advice given to aspiring writers to the effect that they ought always to look upon the human scene in terms of “All is grist that comes to my mill,” and that intolerance and indignation should give way to fascinated observation. I have forgotten the source, but the author then said something like “Suppose Shakespeare had gone around wasting his energy by disapproving of the human race, instead of concentrating on accurately recording its behavior?”
As the above ideas have emerged, in circumstances where I have had the leisure and energy to think about them, I have found myself experiencing a little more compassion for some of those creeps that I mentioned; I am less agitated by their faults than I would have been a few years ago. Occasional shafts of forgiving light have even been thrown across the behavior of some of those nearest and dearest to me. Their weaknesses are more detestable than those of casual companions, because the faults of our loved ones may be a real practical threat to our well-being.
I suppose it does not take normal human beings years to perceive such obvious, everyday truths. They already know all that I have been saying. But I seem to have managed to avoid seeing the obvious throughout a long lifetime, even during the past eleven years, during which I have ceased to drug my mind with alcohol.
Copyright © The AA Grapevine, Inc.
Becoming Aware