"...of all possible worlds"

 

As an uncertified life coach and certified school teacher, the summer months give me a little more time to read through my never-ending mailbag of uncertified life-coaching questions. We focus this season, however, on one simple query sent to us from a long-time reader from Inland County, Illinois.

The reader writes, “Good morning! Recently a person I don’t know and will likely never meet said something I found very offensive. What should I do about this?”

That’s a good question, not necessarily because it’s actually a good question, but because it’s so common. Nowadays it seems every time we turn around someone who has no vested interest in our lives is saying or doing something so outlandish we cannot help but get on Facebook and tell everyone about it. In fact, because of the consistency of this issue, I’ve developed a three-question strategy for dealing with the constant barrage of irritating nonsense.

The first and perhaps most important question you should ask yourself is, “Was the message intended for me?” Because the truth is, if the message was not directed at you, it might be better if you just mind your own business. Getting angry every time someone says something you don’t agree with doesn’t make the message go away, it just makes you harder to live with.

            However, if you do insist on making it your business, ask yourself this next question:  “Did I actually process and understand the message in its entirety, taking into consideration all of the context surrounding the speaker, message and, once again, intended audience?”

Oftentimes what makes us angry is not the message itself but the so-called analysis of the message by one of our ideological thugs I mean commentators. In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a culture dedicated to selling us stuff we don’t need. This is done most effectively if we are sad or angry and especially if we are sad and angry at each other, and so everything that happens or is even said gets immediately filtered through an ideological prism. If you are at peace with yourself and your neighbor, you’re less likely to spend money.

Therefore, if you are going to invest time and emotional energy into being upset, at the very least you need to process the whole message, not just the most dramatic bits and pieces that would make anyone angry. After all, even a Dr. Seuss' book can be unsettling if taken out of context.

 Speaking of books, the final question we need to ask before committing ourselves to being offended is, “How’s my own garden growing?”

This question is inspired by Voltaire’s Candide, the Enlightenment-era satire that tells the story of a young man and his tutor Pangloss, who travel the “best of all possible worlds,” bumping into one travesty after another, most notably the horrific Lisbon earthquake of 1755.  At the end of all his travels, Candide comes to the understanding that perhaps the best course of action in a world where trouble seems imminent is for him to simply cultivate his own farm.

Thus, the story ends with the title character working the earth as an antidote to “boredom, vice and poverty,” and goodness knows growing our own food is a great way to tend to our own health and make the world a little better if we have enough to share. (Which you will if you grow zucchini.) Your “garden” doesn’t have to be an actual garden, though. Your garden might simply be your calling. What have you been put on this earth to do by your creator?

Voltaire was a deist, though, but the message is basically the same even if your theology (or lack thereof) requires you to replace an involved creator with nature itself. For example, nature has made eagles to fly, snakes to crawl, and cheetahs to run. We, as humans, are part of nature, and we each have gifts and experiences, abilities and passions, that make us suitable for certain tasks.

 But we are not all suited for the same tasks, however, and we certainly aren’t suited for all of them. Just as a fish would look absurd trying to climb a tree, we make ourselves look foolish when we  become upset by words spoken by people who wouldn’t skim the words in our obituary. 

This doesn’t mean we become cold and indifferent to all of the injustices in the world, of course, but it does mean we should ask ourselves the very serious question “What can I do, today, where I am, to make the world a better place? How is my own garden growing, and how can I cultivate it even more?”

After all, as another clever person explained centuries before Voltaire, it’s silly of us to get offended by the speck of wood in our neighbor’s eyes while ignoring the plank stuck in our own.