And here, in Heather Lelache’s musing, is a prompt toward a way of being I still aspire to:
“Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead.”
Rereading this for the first time in so long unlocks something for me, actually.
And here’s what in unlocked, with apologies if either framing or phrasing aren’t as elegant as they could be:
Attention is a choice, and our choices of what and who we attend to tend to color subsequent choices downstream of them. And I just don’t like what it does to me when I attend overlong to those – however closely aligned we may be in our politics or other grounding beliefs – who have not overcome their rage at evil.
Note what LeGuin has Heather Lelache perceive: that *it is possible to see and to counter evil without succumbing to rage*, without letting that rage become your personality. This is who I want to be. These are the people I want to be around. These are the voices I want in my life.
This does imply a hygiene: that of no longer attending to articulations that come from a place of rage, ressentiment or revenge. And that’s where I am.
