Around Christmas time one year, when my oldest son was four or so, someone asked him if he’d been good this year. It was an innocent question, a question people often ask children because it is, in the folklore of contemporary life, tied to the gifts that might be waiting underneath the tree come Christmas morning.
My son was never one for masks and pretending. He said, “I’ve been a little good and a little bad.”
And it was true; he had.
This contradiction lives in all of us. We all have the capacity within us to be a hero one day and a villain the next. We all have a measure of good that is countered by a measure of evil (though we are not, ourselves good or evil; we are simply human). We all struggle wrestle with both light and darkness.
I want, more than anything, to be kind in all ways. I desire to make every interaction count. I hope, always, to be an ever-present, encouraging voice.
And yet there are times I feel myself overcome with emotion—so overcome that my greatest desire is to lash out and hurt, to say words that I know I’ll regret later, to feel the power, however convoluted or corrupt it is, of being on top for just a moment in time.
There is a mean bone in all of us that wants to feel like we matter in the grand scheme of things, that we belong somewhere, that we are people who have a small pinch of power.
These contradictions that exist within all of us are relatively harmless—when our thoughts remain thoughts and we remain vigilant. When we recognize, accept, and restrain them.
In these contradictions, we can feel the connection of humanity—the dark impulses rising up in us that we can imagine rise up in everyone else, too. If we sit with that darkness for a while, we can understand the impulses that govern the cruel, we can measure the capacity for harm, we can almost, maybe just a little bit, fathom why this cruelty sometimes spills out into the fraught spaces of the world.
But if we deny these dark places within ourselves, if we say of course we have never had a terrible thought about another person, if we do not at least momentarily acknowledge and connect with that side of ourselves, we will never completely understand the failures of some to control it.
And, what is more, when our darkness is ignored and denied as though it never existed at all, it becomes stronger and more difficult to control.
If ignored and denied long enough, we could fall into the gap between our real selves and our imagined (better) selves. And once in the gap, the darkness does not have to work hard to best our control, to control us instead of the other way around.
Better to deny or acknowledge?
I know which I’d choose.
(Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash)
