Of late, I’ve come to realize that I have a certain skillset that has made it not always easy to oppose what I do.
I think most people would be aware of it, and it would be independently true regardless of whatever my opinion of it happens to be – in other words, if you were here to just think well, that’s not really correct is it? Surely he is delusional.
That’s totally fine and I’m ok with that – in fact, I would invite you to think in exactly that fashion, because it would then be easier for me to internally return to a time when that was not really the case or to bring myself back to a baseline where I would consider myself a bit more normal and more calibrated – not different in a statistically significant way from anyone else of my age or class, not different from other human beings in general.
But it is not always easy to do that anymore, even if I am constantly conscious that I should touch grass and keep my feet on the ground.
In fact, I’m going to just deliberately choose not to highlight some of the things that happened of late and note that if you want to learn about them, you will have to do the legwork and come to your own conclusions; is he correct, or is he wrong? Is he delusional?
I am totally ok if you decide that I am delusional, incidentally – that could be for the better and in some small ways, once again, I might actually prefer that.
But now, speaking just generally though and without any reference to my personal circumstances, I thought I would highlight a clip that I remember from (love him or hate him) Jordan Peterson’s podcast interview with Joe Rogan, in which he discusses “The meek shall inherit the earth”, from Matthew 5:5.
It is a wonderful interview, made more wonderful by the fact that he observes that there is a problem with the translation.
And there we are, one of the iconic lines I look to when I think about life, the universe, and everything.
I think that it is good to become strong and everything – yet that it would be delusional to the height of folly to imagine that as weak human beings we have control over the vast majority of our lives, and even so defeatistly foolish to consider that we have no agency when it is there, staring us constantly in the face.
In the small span of control that I have over the domain of what I can see, understand, and influence, I hope for something small and I would imagine relatively simple – to be able to master the universe that I am to master peacefully, putting in effort, gaining its reward, encountering and living in and breathing in the world’s complexity without needing to use the powers that allow me to do so to crush, oppress, tyrannize, or otherwise impede the progress of others, understanding that people may go ahead of me, before me, or with me – each person on their own journey.
The Bible’s translation of “Meek” may not have been the very best way to understand it – but I understand the spirit in which the phrasing had come to pass, recognizing the context a little better than I did before.
And thus, I will endeavor to be ‘meek’, in that broader way.
