Sh*t To Help You Show Up April 26, 2024

Revisiting the wisdom of near enemies

Hello! Please gather around the water cooler at my third job. Yep, my job. It’s a job I love, honestly. But as Anne Helen Peterson over at Culture Study reminded all of us recently, passion work is frequently devalued and exploitative. The thinking goes that the sense of purpose it gives the worker is it’s own compensation.

Purpose doesn’t pay my mortgage, though. So, if you’re a regular reader of the newsletter, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. Please and thank you.

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I recently started working with a book therapist.

She’s not a therapist, technically. Perhaps she’d be better titled an author’s companion. Except she’s pushing me to examine the habits of mind and storytelling I persist in that put me firmly in my own way. So, she’s a kind of confrontational companion?

This isn’t generally the type of companion I choose for myself. Like most of us, I tend towards choosing the companionship of folks who are comfortable to be around, generally. They make me feel good about myself. Which might sound sort of narcissistic, but then thinking about the reverse is helpful. Do you choose friends and companions that make you feel badly about yourself? I hope not.

Initiating this companionship, though, is reminding me of the importance of having people in your life that call you on your bullshit. We need people in our lives who can see us rambling along with all of our good intentions while still doing the same sneaky, self-protective crap we’ve always done and kindly say, “Hey. Why do you keep doing that?”

Is this a comfortable experience? Absolutely not. Will it make my book better? I want to say emphatically, YES. But the more honest answer is, I sure as hell hope so.

This experience reminded me of an important edition of the newsletter from a while back. It was about the Buddhist teaching on near enemies. As I wrote in the original newsletter, far enemies are the opposite of virtues we aspire to. They’re easy to see as undermining our efforts to show up in the world as the people we want to be. Near enemies are much harder to discern because they “so closely mimic our desired emotion or virtue we can trick ourselves into thinking we are achieving what we aspire to while all along the near enemy is undermining our conscious intentions from within.”

Click through to read the whole thing, if you’re curious. There’s lots of good information and links in it.

The practice of integrity is a complex one, so it offers us more than one way to derail ourselves. Rationalization, placation, and righteousness all tempt us away at various points in our practice, even as they allow us to rest easy in our confidence that we are practicing our integrity like a champ.

Recognizing that we’ve done that thing again— that habitual thing we do that undermines our intentions— can be a gut punch. But it’s worth remembering that it’s largely unconscious and very, very human. Still, hopefully, once you see it in yourself you can’t unsee it. Then you have the opportunity to really look at it, figure out where it’s coming from, what sense of ignorance or vulnerability it’s protecting you from feeling, and work to make different choices.

Meanwhile, I’ll be over here, writing this book and trying hard to stop scrambling endlessly to justify my right to tell the story and just tell it. Wish me luck.

What’s your experience with near enemies?

What are the ways, with the best of intentions, that you get in your own way?