Your Anti-Hero

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In October of 2022, Taylor Swift released her album Midnights, which contains the hit song “Anti-Hero.”⁠1 Part of this musical poem’s brilliance is that it’s a personal confession of a universal truth, namely that there’s an anti-hero in all of us. 

That’s not a very comfortable truth to admit, as Swift does with endearingly playful and sardonic honesty. It’s a lot easier to listen to someone else sing about her emotional struggles and relationship-sabotaging behavior than to face our own. The song is a hit because it hits home for anyone with some self-awareness.

We’d rather see ourselves as the hero of our own story, not the anti-hero; entire marketing programs⁠2 are built on this principle. But the truth is not so simple. The paradox is that we’re both heroes and anti-heroes, or if you will, there’s a hero and an anti-hero within each of us. It’s why Swift can lament getting older but never wiser; why she can identify the prices, vices, and crisis associated with her own devices; and why she can ultimately confess that she’s the problem.

Why do we stare at the sun but not in the mirror? Looking in the mirror can be scary, but perhaps the more powerful reason is that looking in the mirror is lonely. The beginning of a new year, which you may have celebrated on a midnight not long ago, is a natural time for reflection and resolution to change. In 2023, I hope you’ll decide to get to know your anti-hero better, and I hope you’ll also find a trustworthy, empathetic person—a therapist, mentor, counselor, coach, or just a true friend—to be a living mirror for you. 

Best wishes for this new year!

1 https://digital.umusic.com/taylorswiftmidnights

2 https://storybrand.com

The Power of Positive Peer Pressure

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For the first time in my now middle-aged life, I recently ran a half marathon. If you would have asked me a year ago what I thought of such athletic endeavors, I might have called them a popular form of torture. So what in the world could have inspired me to do this?

Positive peer pressure.

A friend invited and challenged me to train for the race and run it with her. Knowing her enthusiasm for athletic feats, I said, “Sure. Why not?” She sent me a training plan, and we began to train, each in our own cities. On the day of the half marathon, as we were preparing to drive downtown to the starting line, she told me she had decided not to run due to an injury from which she had not sufficiently recovered. It was wise not to tell me beforehand. Already dressed and ready to go, I wouldn’t back out—despite the freakish cold front that had dropped the temperature to 33º on a March morning in Alabama.

And so with all the other runners, I gathered in downtown Montgomery for the start of the race. I had trained at just under a blazing fast 12 minutes per mile, so I placed myself between the appropriate pacing groups and waited for the gun to crack the air. We were off, and more motivated than ever not to stop, for who would want to walk in such cold?

It turned out to be a lovely jog through the city. I had gotten the clothing right and was warm enough. The course was laid out well. The water stations were adequate—and it gave me joy to see a few parishioners of the small Greek Orthodox community where I serve part-time staffing the first water station. Of course, the half marathon wasn’t without its challenges: running up the hill and over the interstate on Perry Street at mile 10 was brutal, as was the wind on the overpass. At no other point did I want so much to stop.

But I didn’t stop. I ran the whole thing, 13.1 miles. And (probably due in part to adrenaline) at an average mile pace 30 seconds faster than that at which I had trained.

All because of positive peer pressure. And fittingly for this reflection, my training partner met me at mile 12 and ran the last mile with me. 

I’m not sure I’ll ever run another half marathon. If I reach old age, I’d like to enjoy the functioning of my knees without unnecessary pain. But the whole experience was an immensely gratifying achievement. I hope I never forget it and that I apply the lesson and strategy of positive peer pressure over and over again. And as you, dear reader, work toward your goals, which are often in a “discomfort zone” if they truly have transformative potential, I hope you will remember the immense power of positive peer pressure and consider ways to give yourself this incredible support for your challenge. 

May your efforts be blessed!

The Insult of Inattentiveness

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As a high school English teacher, one of my favorite activities to organize for my students was a Shakespearean insult contest. Two students would face off and cast their most acerbic aspersions at each other, ideally to the cheers and jeers of the rest of the class. It was far more fun than slogging through the text of entire acts of the plays.

It turns out that there are a lot of ways to insult people. One of them is so common that we may not even think of it as an insult:

Enlightened hearing takes in what is said. He who is lacking in [this quality] insults the person who has spoken. —Maximos the Confessor* 

More often than I’d like, I find myself distracted in conversations, and sometimes it’s my own fault. Most recently, a friend called while I was doing light office work. Instead of calling back later or stopping my work to give my complete attention, I tried to do both. Even if photocopying doesn’t take a lot of attention, the tiny bit it takes made me less present to a dear friend, who was—fortunately for me—sensitive and gracious to offer to talk at a later time that would be good for each of us.

Perhaps considering our failure to listen attentively as an insult to the speaker will motivate us to give more attention to the attention we give others.

*In his 2nd Century on Love, #97

Trade it for Tears

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A friend responded to my last article on anger and its management with the following:

Right now, mentally, I’m really angry at the anti-vaxxers, and at #45 (I stay mad at him…), and I’m not sure how much reading of your article is going to help.

Leaving aside the highly politicized topics of vaccines and past presidents—for there are plenty of angry people on both sides of those dividing lines—I agree that rereading the article will probably not help with the sort of anger she has. My friend is quite intelligent and surely caught everything the first time she read the article, but more than reading and thinking is necessary to deal with anger. Once we bridle the beast and look it in the face, we need to relax the reins and let it move us to action. 

But if the best destiny of anger is to move us to constructive action, I’m concerned about the pain this enduring anger may be causing my friend, for there are so many circumstances in which the actions of others stir up our anger…and there is little or nothing constructive we can do about it. In such situations, we have at least two options:

First is Andy Dufresne’s option: scrape away, bit by bit, day after day. If there is some small, constructive thing we can do with the anger—civil conversations, writing for the sake of understanding and seeking truth, tunneling out of the cell in which we were unjustly imprisoned—then we can channel the anger into that activity.

The other option is to trade it for tears. When there’s really nothing constructive that we can do—when the drunk driver who killed your loved one also died in the accident, when cancer ends your child’s life early—we can trade anger for sorrow.

Or maybe we can do both. Maybe we can take action to help others and alternately lament our helplessness. Maybe we can harness the power to confront constructively and also accept our powerlessness.

Bridle the Beast

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Over the past few years—a stressful period during which a contentious presidential election, a coronavirus pandemic, and the death of George Floyd all occurred—you may have felt some anger from time to time, beyond your normal experience of the feeling. Even if you wouldn’t call it “anger”, increased levels of impatience or frustration certainly count.

My interest in anger began a few years ago, when—to my shock—I found myself resembling this masterful description of the wrathful:

When some word or deed or suspicion causing annoyance has roused this disease [of wrath], then the blood boils round the heart, and the soul rises up for vengeance. As in pagan fables some drugged drink changes human nature into animal form, so a man is sometimes seen to be changed by wrath into a boar, or dog, or panther, or some other wild animal. His eyes become bloodshot; his hair stands on end and bristles; his voice becomes harsh and his words sharp. His tongue grows numb with passion and refuses to obey the desires of his mind. His lips grow stiff; and unable to articulate a word, they can no longer keep the spittle produced by passion inside the mouth, but dribble froth disgustingly when they try to speak. 

Gregory of Nyssa, Homily 2 on the Beatitudes

Not my proudest moment. But because what I’ve learned from this experience may be helpful, I write to share a few thoughts about anger.

First of all, anger is a gift. It’s a natural response to a threat and a motivation to protect what needs protection, a sign that something needs to be confronted. Moreover, it’s the energy to get things done. Without anger it’s difficult—if not impossible—to achieve certain goals.

But for all the good it can do, anger is a double-edged sword with enormous destructive potential. It needs to be managed. Here are three principles by which to do that:

  1. Bridle the Beast—Sometimes you’ll be fuming. Unless you’re an extraordinarily virtuous person or surrounded with relationships of exceptional trust, it’s generally not advisable to blow your top. Practice self-control, the ability to pause between stimulus and response—at least for that moment if not forever.
  2. Look it in the Face—Once you separate yourself from the anger you feel and objectify it, you can examine it, which will enable you to state at whom or what you’re angry and why. Very often, just hearing yourself articulate these facts can reframe or refresh your perspective. Sometimes you’ll find your anger justified, many other times not. Once you can say why and at whom or what you’re angry, you can engage in confrontation much more constructively.
  3. Relax the Reins—Sometimes the anger will stick around and move you to action. Sometimes it will trot away after being identified as selfish or unjustified. But if it remains, you must let yourself take appropriate action and engage in constructive confrontation and conflict. Without this final step, you run the danger of repression, resentment, and even physical illness. 

A more difficult spiritual path by which to manage anger is to purify it through detachment and the uprooting of self-will. Desire, particularly when it’s thwarted or its object is threatened, drives anger. The more we sacrifice self-will in favor of a desire for something greater, the less problematic anger will be.

That’s all very philosophical, and there’s a chance we could still blow our tops from time to time. So finally, humility and asking forgiveness are indispensible for those moments when our failure to manage our anger turns it into a bucking bronco instead of a well-trained racehorse. 

A Cure for Instability

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The deadline for mailing gifts to arrive in time for Christmas is quickly approaching. If you’re lucky, you may receive a very personal gift during this holiday season. Even if you’re not so fortunate as to get a hand-knitted scarf from a friend who took up yarn-wrangling during the pandemic, you’ll probably receive something. You’ll probably give too.

Most of us know intuitively that something has been lost in our post-industrial, technologically advanced world. In the midst of unprecedented wealth, power, and knowledge, there is a tangible disconnectedness. Add to it political tension, a coronavirus pandemic, and the resulting economic disruption, and we live in a world of profound instability.

In the midst of this, I was lucky enough to give a gift to someone who understands gifts the way ancient people do. Nearly every time we speak by phone, she reminds me of the gift I gave her and how meaningful it is to her. And she recently gave me the “meta-gift” of understanding gifts the way she does, a book that taught me that there is a cure for this instability in which we live, for which the holiday season presents a golden opportunity: the giving and receiving of gifts. 

In The Gift,º Marcel Mauss presents a stunning survey of gift-related practices in ancient societies from every corner of the globe. His observations and conclusions provide us with a few precious principles that all of us can apply to create stability in an unstable world:

  • A gift is a living thing: It carries with it the spirit of the person who gave it. To give it is to give part of yourself, and to receive it is to receive a part of someone else’s essence. When we give and receive gifts in a truly personal way, we revivify our experience of life.
  • Giving is a good cultural norm: “In ancient societies, people were anxious to give. There was no occasion of importance when one was not obliged to invite friends and share the produce of the chase or forest; to redistribute everything at a potlatch; or to recognize services from chiefs, vassals, or relatives by means of gifts. Failing these obligations—at least for the nobles—etiquette was violated and rank was lost.” The social pressure to give gifts is not a bad thing.
  • It’s in our best self-interest to give: There is an old Hindu teaching that the secret of fortune and happiness is to give, not to keep, not to seek but to distribute it that it may return in this world and in the other. According to this teaching, self-renunciation and getting only to give is the real source of profit and the law of nature. It is in the nature of food, in particular, to be shared; to fail to give others a part is to “kill its essence”, to destroy it for oneself and for others: “He who eats without [this] knowledge kills his food, and his food kills him.”
  • Giving and receiving gifts creates a sense of reciprocity and connectedness: The person who receives a gift does not merely recognize that he has received it, but realizes that he himself is in a sense “bought” until it is paid for.

Mauss concludes with a few suggestions for modern societies: “The rich should come once more, freely or by obligation, to consider themselves as the treasurers of their fellow citizens…Meanwhile, the individual must work and be made to rely more upon himself than upon others.” Ending with the famous image of King Arthur’s round table, Mauss asserts: “The mere pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of the whole, to the rhythm of its work and pleasures, and hence in the end to the individual.”

These ideas have implications on many levels, from the individual to the national. In a time of instability, giving and receiving gifts may be the most deeply human way to cure it and the disconnectedness that fuels it. 

º https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Gift/

The Most Effective Response to Pain

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In the school of adversity,ª you sometimes get your knuckles rapped. Sometimes it’s your fault. Sometimes it’s another person’s fault. And sometimes, it’s no one’s fault; it’s just life. 

In any case, the pain is real. And sometimes those knuckles can throb for quite a while. The big question is: how will we deal with our affliction?

In his commentary on the psalms,º Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra writes:

It is natural to consider [the feeling of affliction] as something negative, as something to be avoided, or to pretend that we are the kind of people who are not affected by such things. However, the experience of affliction is at the center of the life of every soul…

The truth is that afflictions are not the signs of God’s absence or abandonment but rather of His presence. Afflictions are like the kneading of the dough in the making of the bread…without them the soul is left unformed, cold, and alone. It is affliction alone that can tear us away from our isolated, individual existence and transform us into something much more whole and open…

From my affliction, I called upon the Lord, and He heard me and brought me into a broad place (Psalm 117.5). It was while I was in the midst of my afflictions that I remembered the Lord, and so I cried out to Him, and in response He transformed the narrowness of my heart into a broad place…He opened my heart and enlarged my soul and so enabled me to accept suffering…

He taught me how to live in this broad place, with an open heart that is able to contain all things. My heart has become like a vast reservoir: no matter how much water you pour into it, you’ll never be able to fill it, and no amount of troubles or afflictions can overcome me, since God alone can fill my heart. I called out to God in my affliction, and what did He do? He opened my heart, He made it so large, so wide, that now it can contain God Himself. Before, the littlest thing was enough to drown me, but no longer, for my afflictions proved to be but a preparation to receive God.

While this commentary may be more meaningful to people of faith, it contains a principle that applies to everyone, regardless of belief in God: the most effective response to affliction is to express it in a safe conversation, to a person with empathetic care for you.

What the wise monastic wrote won’t always happen to you, but sometimes it will. Sometimes it will happen when you hear yourself express aloud what you’ve never before expressed. And sometimes it will happen when the person who is listening—whether divine or human—responds in a way that transforms the pain into a soul-expanding force.

ª https://allaxispartners.com/the-school-of-adversity/

º https://www.indiktos.gr/ασκητικα/576-psalms-and-the-life-of-faith.html

The Solution to Anger

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The loss of actor Chadwick Boseman at the relatively young age of 43 is truly sad. Yet as we remember him in this moment of U.S. history, he gives his fans a parting gift in his portrayal of leadership in Black Panther, a story that expresses some of the societal themes with which we are currently struggling.

Boseman’s character is strong while merciful, intense while self-controlled, and ultimately guided by virtue. While the character that Boseman portrays is fictional, King T’Challa is worth remembering in such tumultuous times, when at least from Mitch Albom’s perspective,ª widespread anger is engulfing and exhausting the United States. 

On the subject of anger, the 4th century desert ascetic Evagrius, who actually lived in Africa (north of the fictional Wakanda), has something worthwhile to say: the opposite of anger and its solution is love. For the Christian Evagrius, love expresses itself in many ways, as patience, kindness, sacrifice, et cetera, but its most important expression as a cure for anger is imperturbability and self-control. 

In his psychology, Evagrius writes of three parts or powers of the soul: the desiring, the spirited, and the rational. Anger comes from the spirited part. He asserts that the soul operates in a natural, healthy way when the desiring part desires virtue, the spirited part does battle for it, and the rational devotes itself to the contemplative observance of the created world. According to Evagrius, the virtues proper to the spirited power of the human soul are courage, perseverance, and imperturbability—not anger and its company (rage, resentment, hatred, et cetera).º

Doing battle for virtue means first doing battle to attain and cultivate it oneself. Leaders have additional responsibilities to the people they serve. While there are relatively few people with positions of leadership that allow them to pass laws, create policies, or reform systems, everyone can be part of the solution for an angry nation if we remember these two Africans—the one a fictional native and the other a real immigrant—and devote ourselves to the practice of virtue, and especially to dispassionate, imperturbable love.

ª https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2020/08/30/mitch-albom-devastating-week-leaves-us-weary-worn-and-wondering/5668254002/

º For an excellent introduction to Evagrius on this subject: https://svspress.com/dragons-wine-and-angels-bread/

Fear’s Function

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If you were walking through the woods and saw a bear, which then turned to look at you, I hope you would feel some fear.ª The function of fear is to protect us from threats. 

Those pursuing power and greatness sometimes come to believe that the greater or more powerful they are, the less they have to fear. But this is a dangerous error.

When a man grows inwardly and increases in holiness, he is something great and marvelous. But just as the elephant fears the mouse, so the holy man is still afraid of sin, lest after preaching to others he himself “should be cast away” (1 Corinthians 9.27).

Saint John of Karpathos

If the saint fears sin, what does the person aspiring to worldly greatness fear? The lawsuit alleging racial discrimination or sexual harassment? Being convicted of theft or fraud? He often doesn’t seem to fear them before they happen, too late for fear to protect him.

In his first inaugural address,º President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It was meant to exhort his hearers to progressive action and away from the fear of paralysis and retreat caused by the Great Depression.

But please don’t quote President Roosevelt’s line out of context. Only a fool would aspire to be fearless.

ª Unless, of course, you were Saint Seraphim of Sarov.

º https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp

Prediction & Presence

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There’s a lot of effort put into forecasting—from the stock market and customer behavior, to the weather and the amount of material a company should order for manufacturing wool socks if the winter will be an especially cold one. Accurate prediction can be a powerful tool for management. 

But in human relationships and leadership, prediction has a much more limited value since it can trap us in rigidity, calcifying our thinking, emotional responses, or behavior. It’s helpful for the parent as manager to know there’s a high likelihood of a hungry or tired child at a certain hour, but it doesn’t exactly instill a growth mindset in anyone when we are too attached to a prediction about them. One of my seminary professors once called this “the sin of familiarity.”

We fall into this trap because prediction is attractive, for it creates the illusion of control.

In his beautiful book A Primer for Forgetting,ª Lewis Hyde shares “a discipline of the present moment” from British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, namely divesting oneself of memory and desire in one’s encounters with another:

To make room for intuitive knowing, every analytic session “must have no history and no future.” The therapist who knows something from the past may as well forget it to make room for the unknown…“do not remember past sessions.“…for when such things occupy the mind, the “evolution of the session” won’t be seen at the only time it can be seen, in the present moment. Second, avoid all desire, especially “desire for results, ‘cure,’ or even understanding.”

My friend George, part of whose work is in the aforementioned forecasting for wool sock production, reframes and expands on this idea: “Interacting with others based on our expectations from past encounters can make us callous to the possibility that others (and even ourselves) can and do change. When we expect certain behavior, we’re likely to frame and respond to others’ behavior in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and doing so, we may fail to recognize growth and change, which can prolong resentment and delay forgiveness.”

And so for an alliteratively plosive principle: Don’t let prudent predictions of the probable preclude the practice of presence to the possible.

ª https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374237219