Prometheus's Wish
“If I suffer, I do not therefore wish that
as many as possible should suffer too; Far from it.”
This sentence is remarkable. In one line
Aeschylus shows us what seems to me to be a problem we have faced for a long,
long time. Perhaps it is just immature lashing out that causes us to wish our
pain on others. Whatever it is it really must stop.
People get hurt. They think their hurt is
unique. They think others have not suffered as they have. They become grandiose
and heroic. They become unwilling martyrs to pain. Among other things they
become annoying.
You've all met someone like that. Likely,
you have all been that person at least once in life. It can feel quite
embarrassing to realize the brutal honesty of your less-than-special pain. But
who cares? You move on from it as you have to. You live through it or with it.
I had a friend one time who got really
angry at me because she thought I was trying to fix her. I hadn't even known
she was broken, especially considering I don't view people as broken or unbroken. She was going through a divorce. She became friends with some
creepy jerk she spent months bad mouthing for being a creepy jerk. Turns out he
had been divorced so he understood what she was going through better than I
ever could, according to her. How do you compete with that kind of 'logic'? You
don't. You walk away. It would have been easy to pick a fight and ask at what
point in time did I lose my ability to empathize with pain, hurt, suffering? To
what end though? The problem certainly wasn't mine. And there is absolutely
nothing you can do with someone who thinks that way. I encounter it all the
time working with addictions. People will only work with people who have had
addictions issues before. Go for it, I say. And I don't even say it with tongue in cheek or negative thoughts.
When my father died I was very upset. I
still get sad about this. I had a friend one time who asked me point blank: Are
you going to grieve forever? This was actually about my answering a harmless
question about having time booked off and I said I probably won't have my head
in the game for the anniversary week so I booked it off. Now, I could have
pointed out that her father wasn't very healthy, he wasn't going to be around
forever, stuff like that. I could have even wished he would die so she would
understand and not be so mean-spirited. What did I actually do in response to
this? I got hurt, that's what. But more importantly, I wished she would never
have to know the depth of loss and hurt I felt. I wished nobody in the world
would have to feel it. Knowing that this isn't possible I also wished that
people could be resilient enough to continue living with that pain, and secretly wished that I was resilient enough. Because
that's life. There is no reason for me to wish pain on others. Arguably this could ultimately be wishing more pain upon myself. And I am far from a martyr.
When I reconnected with my birth mother I was a fire-driven teenager. I should have hated her guts for giving us up, I should have used that opportunity to blame her for everything bad that happened in my life. That would have been easy. Instead, when I first saw her, I cried. We cried together. What else is there to do? I cannot blame her for anything, in fact, I ought to thank her because if she had never sent us to someone who could take care of us statistically I would be in a very bad place right now. I understand her decision and more importantly I understand her hurt. What good would it do to hurt her more? To hurt her unnecessarily? That would be a particular kind of evil.
Prometheus, chained to his rock, destined to live out his immortality in excruciating pain and agony, can explain that he has no desire to increase suffering in the world. We all could learn a lesson from that.
