IT'S NEARLY NEVER ABOUT YOU.

I waste a lot of my time speculating. No, I'm not sifting for gold in a clear mountain stream or hedging funds, whatever that means.  I mean I spend a lot of time observing my environment and speculating on the causes of what I see. It is my nature. Some would say that I am hard-wired for science. The baseline hypothesis about life which has come from all that observation and speculation is that much of what I see is never what I think it is.

A simple example may illustrate. I live on a well traveled street. It isn't a busy commercial or commuting route, but it is an exit route from a collection of one-way streets. During weekdays, it is common for a driver to park at the curb in front of my house. Most will exit their vehicles and go to a neighboring house for some reason or another. Occasionally, an unfamiliar car will pull to the curb and the driver will sit alone for some time in his car. On several occasions, my curiosity has gotten the better of my caution. I've walked out with the intention of asking the driver if I can be of assistance. I come from a time when urban neighborhoods were safer because people paid attention.

More often than not, the driver is so alarmed to see me approaching the vehicle that he/she speeds off. I will never know if my speculation that those people were up to no good was correct. I have seen postal trucks, cable company trucks and parcel delivery trucks idling out there too. My speculation that they were coming to deliver something to my house or perform some service here has nearly never proven true. One cable company man was indignant when I inquired about his using the curb in front of my house for over an hour to totally unload contents of the back of his truck onto my sidewalk and stoop, in order to reorganize it. When I told him we had issues with our internet service from his company, he gruffly told me to call the 800 number and continued with his redecorating.

This realization ...that it is nearly never about me ... is both liberating and disconcerting. Liberation is seldom a comfortable state in my experience. To accept that you are not always the cause of what happens to you or to your environment is realistic. But our age of electronic illusion, based in keyboard, mouse, remote and touch screen, breeds a certain unavoidable narcissism. Our illusion of control places us in the center of all things around us, mentally. When annoyances outside our actual control occur, it rattles our illusion that we can always push a button of some sort to stop it.

I feel sorry for social justice fanatics who get triggered by words. They are pathetic victims of the all-about-me illusion. It seems strange for me to be grateful to have grown up in a time when words like "fag" and "queer" were thrown around more liberally than "nigger" ever was in my environment. When I hear "gay" being said mockingly from time to time, I laugh to myself. Is that the best you can do? To be described derogatorily by someone who has no idea who I really am is more demeaning to the speaker than to me. I know from that moment that I have no interest in that person in any context. I have boycotted more than one small business or volunteer group for this reason.

What about what I think about me? This is the key to understanding my reactions to events around me which trouble me or delight me. I have spent almost five decades, a half century, of adult years on this question in various contexts. I have no standard answer because I am not a standard being. I am constantly changing, adapting, failing, accomplishing, speeding up, slowing down, etc.. There are still moments when I am emotionally a screaming child within my consciousness. There are moments when I am still a reactive primate, not much different from my chimp relatives. And there are times when the net effects of my age, accumulated wisdom, common sense and meditation-driven subjectivity enable me to be a mindful being. I think/feel differently about me in these various states. Hell, I'm frequently not consciously all about me at all.  Thank goodness for that. 

Life hurts most when you know in your deepest being that it is all about you when someone else gets hurt or victimized. Yet these times are when I might most readily deny that it's all about me unless I try very hard to figure it out honestly and take responsibility. Constantly trying to protect others from hurt feelings is a waste of time. Placating true narcissists is a fool's game. They are bottomless pits of entitlement. My time is better spent simply sorting out what is all about me and what isn't, when it actually happens. I deal with the former the best I can as a socially responsible individual. I leave the latter alone as much as I can. I realized a long time ago that I do not want to be the center of any universe.