The Recrimination of Self, The Words of Others

Our greatest opponents are never quite ourselves.

I'm not sure that I have really understood this before now.

There is a very real sense that we our own worst opponents. Beyond anyone else, we are the ones who will remember every failure, every inability, every time that we tried - and failed miserably. We are the holders of the sum total of everything that we have done wrong or failed to do.

But often times those sensations and feelings can sit there - will sit there, forced down by an act of the will - quiescent for weeks or months or years, quietly hiding beneath the soil of our souls as the fertile volcanic soil hides the volcano that built it. In this sense, we are not our own greatest opponents.

It is the combination of ourselves - and others.

Words are terrible things, bright shining swords which we wield oft times unconsciously in huge arcs around our persons. Our words share a quality with Yagyu Munenori's concept (and book title) of The Life Giving Sword: our words have the ability to give life or take it.

They can give life when we use them to encourage, to build up, to speak kindly, to blow life onto the one spark of soul that we see in others when no-one (not even they themselves) grasp that it is there, to keep the dreams of others alive when they themselves cannot. Our words can take life when they cut, they maim, they destroy the hopes and dreams of others, leaving functional corpses which continue to have the illusion of life even as their soul is drained away.

But these words cannot of themselves do anything to us. They are words - a combination of sounds, breath, vowels, consonants, denotation and connotation. It is only when those words combine with the slumbering failures of our souls that our greatest opponent - neither quite us nor quite the speaker - erupts into life.

Like the aftermath of a volcano, the damage is ugly - but often hidden from the outside world: the pyroclastic flows of bitterness and self recrimination pour like a torrent over the green farmland of what was a productive countryside followed by the slower but just as devastating lava flows of failure, leaving skeletons of burned homes and trees and dreams and hope in its wake.

Do things heal? Of course they do - over time, the vegetation will return, followed by animals and then the dreams and thoughts and hopes of our inner selves to inhabit the area again, building the communities of dreams and re-establishing their direction - after all, volcanic soil is some of the most productive and fertile in the world (and can, for example, produce great wines).

But even then, we inhabit where we are with two eyes sideways: one facing inner to the crust over ourselves, the other on the smouldering mountain of the words of others. An eruption of one or the other can be managed. An eruption of both at once - and once again we are fleeing, trying to outrun the devastation before we are overwhelmed.