The other night at work, I was standing outside in the snow talking to a client about random shit. He was from the United States, and I think he was talking about the political climate there right now, and an old man came up to him and I and asked for a lighter.
I was a bit dismissive I think because he was the third person to ask in 5 minutes. I also had something on my mind.
I was watching one of the bartenders make out with a girl from the club outside, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous, just because I wasn’t getting any action that night. You know how it is.
The old man came at the wrong time because right as he was asking, I was jealous and resentful. I’m sure it visibly affected my first impression, because he said to me, “Hey, be nice to people. Ok?”
I didn’t mean to be rude to this man, but he just caught me at the wrong moment. Besides the fact that I was not displeased with the guy at all, I thought about what he had said – it made me think.
I know that he’s probably right, but it’s one of those concepts where, you understand it at a surface level, but can’t grasp it fully.
I must’ve looked like an asshole for him to say that to me. Either way, I’m sure every once in awhile you have moments where you reflect on your life, and whether or not you’re doing things correctly.
Sometimes, there are instances of self-reflection where you wonder if your entire game and outlook need changing. There are moments where I’ve asked if I should be kinder to women, who as I’ve said before in the past, have been nothing but sweet to me my entire life.
Childhood seems like so long ago, the time when you’re the most bitter and pissy with the people that you know. But when you look back on it from an adult perspective, it’s almost impossible to understand why you were so mad and upset all the time.
The reasons were probably entirely inconsequential. It’s tragic to think that you can spend a majority of your life brooding over something which doesn’t matter.
It reminds me of the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who realized that a high infant mortality rate at the Vienna General Hospital was due to an infectious disease carried by medical professionals.
Semmelweis essentially discovered that doctors must wash their hands before handling patients to avoid passing germs to their patients.
In the early 19th century, doctors had no idea what the fuck was going on. They thought that illnesses were caused by “imbalances” of what was called, “humors,” which were four different types of bodily fluids existing in the human body.
Doctors would decide that you needed to be “balanced,” so they would bleed you out because your blood levels were supposed to be similar to the phlegm levels. It was crazy shit.
However, Semmelweis’ ideas were despised by everybody in the medical and scientific community at the time. Doctors were “insulted” by the idea their hands were possibly dirty and contributed to the death of their patients.
When people started to wash their hands in hospitals, the mortality rate was reduced down to 1%. However, because Ignaz was initially laughed at by everyone in the community – due to no one believing him – he became incredibly resentful and malicious.
He spent the last part of his life writing a book where he somewhat proposed his medical theories – but he mostly attacked people and used a majority of the pages to rant about his other colleagues, according to Robert Greene’s book, Mastery.
As a result of his bitterness, he alienated every person that he ever worked with and ended up dying alone, broke, at the age of 47-years-old, after security guards beat the shit out of him in a mental asylum.
If only he would’ve just let it go, he could’ve enjoyed the rest of his life, and even got the credit he deserved for discovering possibly one of the most critical medical improvements of the 19th century.
A person has to learn to cut their losses and move on. Otherwise, you’ll spend a great deal of time obsessing over something for no reason, only to realize later in life that you should’ve just enjoyed your time on earth.
In 2015, my friend and I took acid together, and he had to leave because of work the next day. I ended up laying in my bed listening to ERRA’s EP, Moments of Clarity while tripping out.
I thought that I discovered God, which is a ridiculous cliché to anybody who has experimented with drugs like that before.
It’s so fucking cheesy, but I thought I had discovered a human being’s ability to experience love for other people was God. Love is God, and God is Love.
God isn’t a spirit in the sky.
After I had that revelation, I started bawling my eyes out in remorse and shame, because of all the times that I had been mad at other people, for all of the mean comments I made, for my bad moods, for my mean spirit.
I felt legitimately remorseful for how I had treated others in the past, also for the way I merely felt toward them.
People who do bad things are rarely legitimately evil at the core. Usually, they are harsh, crude, spiteful, or mean, without malice. They are acting out of insecurity, or it’s even possible that they don’t even know that what they’re doing is having such an effect on another person.
It doesn’t hurt to stop and question how your actions are affecting those around you. It’s funny as I say this, I can think of two or three moments in the last two days where I could’ve handled the situation differently, or rather, I should’ve put more effort into being considerate to the other person’s feelings.
However, when in the present moment, I rarely think about anybody other than myself.