The Hard Thing
In which Aldous Huxley and I admit we made mistakes.
Quick note: You may notice some differences around here, namely the fact that I’ve changed the name of this publication from the self-titled matt to The Athlete, which gives this thing more of a broad, journal-ish vibe, and happily allows for broader, weirder, and mysterious-er explorations on my part. No longer the object of the publication, I’m but a contributor to it, if the only one.
The namesake has to do with my being an athlete in the typical sense, but also in the not so typical sense. To be an athlete, I think, applies to all realms of life:
The Athlete must train to become better
The Athlete must compete with confidence, sportsmanship, and finesse
The Athlete must be focused and disciplined
The Athlete must endure pain
The Athlete must care for his body and mind
The Athlete must give himself entirely
The Athlete must know the rules of the game and hold them sacred
The Athlete must be creative and have his own style
The Athlete must play with joy, not fear
The Athlete must never quit
These tenants make up the renewed constitution of this humble publication. Admittedly, these may not differ much from what has always existed here aside from the fact that, having come this far, we are now aware of them.
With love,
MZ
No. 138: The Hard Thing
It should be no surprise that I’ve made many mistakes. I’ve had many things wrong. I’ve blundered left and right.
Let us look at one of these occasions, love, which is not equivalent to acceptance per se. Acceptance in the sense that I accept and love every human for who they are? Yes. Acceptance in the sense that I allow one of my fellows to plunge into a black hole of vice and despair and death? No.
This is the modern misunderstanding, maybe. But the cure might be looking at one another as a good father or mother looks at their child.
Loved always? Yes. Anything goes? No.
How many centuries of humans have forgotten this? It isn’t only our own. Forgotten, in fact, may be too smooth a word. The better phrase might be, chosen to forgo. And this is the crux of the matter. Love is not the easy thing advertisers and Hollywood tell us it is. Love is difficult. Extremely. And not in the way of a Billie Eilish song crooning about heartbreak or her life’s purpose (or the absence thereof).
Love, if sometimes pleasant, is most of the time not. Love is not equivalent to good feeling. Love is often absent of feeling, or filled with pain, because to love is to will the good of the other. This means, for one, to forget about ourselves, placing all the focus on they whom we love. This means the easy route of acceptance per se is zapped, barricaded, removed from the picture, because while love can accept the person, it cannot accept that which the person does that is harmful, negative, or restrictive to the process of that person becoming all they can be, and in that pursuit there is no perceivable ceiling.
Thus, enter pain, because the human person has a mysterious tendency to avoid doing what is truly best for themselves. Enter pain, because as we watch our fellows willfully carry on with subpar ways of life, love does not abandon them, but enters into that suffering with them. Enter pain, because love does not command or enslave or dominate, but allows for free will. Love is not locking my brother in a castle tower and throwing away the key until he gets right. Love is allowing the choice of a glass of whiskey or water, betrayal or fidelity, peace or division, and choosing the better path. Put another way, love is not a singular act. It takes two (or more).
How often I’ve mistaken love! And how difficult my task is now that I know what real love is. And what can we skim from off the top of even this first-order realization? If at the very instant we come to know the true nature of love pain and hardship to enter our lives, how often must we intentionally remain ignorant, or even contrive alternative narratives to avoid being uncomfortable?
Too often.
But this is what the athlete comes to understand from a young age. This must also be what the dying man comes to realize at the end of his life. That is, all that is truly worthwhile is not easily achieved. Aldous Huxley, that quintessentially 20th-century intellectual, said near the end of his time on planet Earth,
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
But why did such a seemingly simple conclusion take this intelligent man so long to uncover? Perhaps because true kindness—true love—is in fact one of the hardest things in the world to know and practice.
Our pride suggests that to be a self-righteous asshole is the strongman’s way. In the face of the slightest difficulty or demand on our person, refuse! For are we not the Gods of the World, modern and independent men and women? Our pride says to the husband whose wife has wronged him in some way, divorce her. It says to the professional publicly ridiculed by a colleague, hate him. But these are not right responses inasmuch as they are easy ones. They take no thought, no strength, no character. They are baseness, weakness, and cowardice disguised as their opposites.
If only the struggle would stop there. Love is also saying the things that come off, at fist glance, as potentially unloving—and so further down the rabbit hole we go.
The Church has a saying, Love the person, not the sin, and knowing many in the school of the modern intelligentsia will recoil from this, I challenge you. Is there not great truth in this?
Let’s pause to quickly ask ourselves: how dedicated are we, really, to the truth. anyway? Put another way, does the “modern intelligentsia” give a shit about the truth as they once did? Or have they fully transitioned to subjective-relative truth? Society at large, it seems, prefers what’s easy, which as already discussed, is less of a mass condemnation from on high than a recognition of our humble human nature. Still, what’s easy is rarely the truth, and the truth rarely reflects kindly on its subject.
Thus, love is not, as I saw often growing up, allowing your underaged child to drink alcohol at home because at least this way, you know where they are and that they’re safe. It’s the easy route.
Love is not, as we see today, having a child with gender dysphoria and asking an all-too-willing surgeon to lop off or re-fabricate their perfectly made parts. This is a love perverted. The hard thing—true love—would be to have that infinitely hard talk, a talk not absent of love, but full of it, because it is willing the good of the other (rather than their literal destruction).
In our imperfections, we are perfect. This is only true, however, if we can recognize our imperfections. Paradoxical, yes. But have we ever been guaranteed that truth must not enter into the realm of paradox? We are not even granted the confidence to know that truth can ever be fully grasped.
Regarding these and similar matters, a song comes to mind by the band Spoon. I hear the words playing in my head often nowadays, and pleasantly, especially when with sadness and confusion I witness so many good people curled up into the ball, or shaking their fists, or raising their voice at any idea that challenges their of New, Revised, and Obviously Correct Understanding of How Everything in the Universe Works.
You got no time for the messenger
Got no regard for the thing that you don't understand
You got no fear of the underdog
That's why you will not survive
That last line is the dagger to the heart. To me, it says: to fail to understand love comes with mortal consequences.
They who rewrite truth and love, goodness and beauty so that it might fit comfortably into how they’d like things to be, rather than how they are, run the very real risk of destroying their lives, and the lives of everyone around them. All we must do, as a proof, is look around. Even looking inward, chances are such a curse already has made its black gouge manifest in your family someway, somehow in the past or even now. None of us will escape it, but all of us can choose to diminish and blunt its effects.
To even consider these concepts is not enjoyable, not fun, not comfortable. But it is edifying, and isn’t that precisely the point?
And so, the good news. Do the hard thing, and like the athlete, you and your team will win.♦
Links
The aforementioned song :) Have an excellent weekend, all.
Love the new name and the reminder of what I am at my core, which I sometimes forget.