I’m old now. If a young person said to me, “What have you learned during the course of your life that might be helpful to me?”, here’s what I would answer.<\/p>\n
Recognize your shortcomings and failings. Don’t give in to the temptation to avoid seeing them. Don’t give in to the temptation to blame them on other people. See them clearly as they are, accurately.<\/p>\n
Many famous people of the past said the same thing. This is what Jesus meant when he said “don’t be a hypocrite” which was a main point of his teaching. Marcus Aurelius and Michel de Montaigne are other famous examples. But I’m not sure their reasons were the same as mine.<\/p>\n
My reasons are that you’ll be happier and kinder.<\/p>\n
I think there’s an additional reason, but I’m not sure it resonates with other people the way it does with me. All my life I wanted to know the truth whatever the truth happens to be. This desire or urge has always been a very powerful drive in me like the drive to love and be loved or the drive to avoid dying. If I were still religious like I was for many years I would call it one of holy aspects of the human mind, one of the pointers we can find there that tells us about God.<\/p>\n
There’s a complication I should mention. Some people lacerate themselves mercilessly. They don’t only recognize their failings but focus on them almost to the exclusion of everything else, yet they get no benefit. Tolstoy is a famous example. I think there is a difference between those people and what I’m recommending here but I’m not sure what it is exactly. I think it has something to do with blame. I’ll leave this question open for the moment.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about this advice lately because I’m now the full-time caretaker of my girlfriend Julia, who I’ve written about here many times over the years, who has dementia. The word girlfriend is probably misleading because we’re in our 70s, but I use it because she never agreed to marry me. (It turns out to be a good thing for financial reasons that we’re not married due to the way the US medical system works.)<\/p>\n
Julia has always found it difficult to recognize her mistakes and shortcomings. She avoids thinking about them. Self-blame seems to be at the heart of this characteristic.<\/p>\n
Now with dementia she gets terribly distressed when she does something dumb like feeding non-medical food to our sick cat or throwing her drivers license and credit cards away. <\/p>\n
Partly her distress is due simply to the fact, the tragedy, that she is losing her intelligence and memory. Of course this is a grievous loss.<\/p>\n
But partly her distress is due to the fact that she blames herself for her mistakes.<\/p>\n
I find myself wondering whether I’ll be the same if I become as demented as she is. I don’t think so because one of the good things that happened to me as a result of the spiritual stuff I write about here is that nowadays I see my own failings without resistance. I feel intuitively that if I become demented in the same way Julia is, this attitude will stay with me for a long time. But maybe the parts of my brain that deteriorate fastest will be different from hers and I’ll revert to the usual human pattern quickly. I can’t know.<\/p>\n
This advice is related to the great discovery by ancient Indian philosophers that we are not our minds. This is a very, very, very difficult thing to see but it’s true. Once you realize that you’re not your mind how can you blame yourself for your mind’s failings? The mind may continue to regret or wish that it were different but that’s not the same thing as blame.<\/p>\n
This question of blame is one of the things I had in mind when I said earlier that I’m not sure my reasons for offering the advice on this page are the same as Jesus’s reasons or Marcus Aurelius’s reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m old now. If a young person said to me, “What have you learned during the course of your life that might be helpful to me?”, here’s what I would answer. Recognize your shortcomings and failings. Don’t give in to the temptation to avoid seeing them. Don’t give in to the temptation to blame them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,33,25],"class_list":["post-6511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-experience","tag-julia","tag-morality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YVpx-1H1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6511"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6516,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6511\/revisions\/6516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}