Kindness is always the right response, but only when it is sincere, without hypocrisy.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.18.5.9a
The old man was stunned that morning. It was just a typical late autumn day. The sky was blue and the trees bare except for a few stubborn leaves that withstood the madness of the gully winds leaving traces of brown and red on the suburb’s canvas. He made an off-the-cuff comment about a posting by a friend, who texted a good morning message that said we only live once, but if we did it right, once is enough.
“I wonder if you’ll say that about sex too. Just do it. Do it right and once is enough,” the old man replied cheekily or so he thought.
“I believe that anyone who twists nice good morning wishes will burn in hell,” the friend, a chap whose mood was as temperamental as Melbourne weather, said before adding “No Hall of Infamy for you though.”
“Yawn. My name doesn’t even appear in our school Hall of Heritage for school leavers, so…” the old man replied and yawned again outwardly, although inwardly, he was shocked by the sharpness of his friend’s acidity.
“So humble,” said the notoriously temperamental chap.
“Thank you, I do try to be. Better be humble than be humbled,” the old man replied cautiously, having discovered that something said tongue in cheek had earned him purgatory.
The notoriously temperamental chap had been giving another bloke, a self-confessed simpleton, a hard time every day for the past few months. You’re a fake, you’re this and that and always in a negative way, and that morning, he called him an arsehole.
“I don’t know how you’re taking this,” the old man said to the self-confessed simpleton. “If you’re fine with it and taking it as silly banter between old men, then carry on. But, if you feel it is veering on online bullying, then maybe it’s time to stop. After all, we don’t want bad habits to form,” he said.
“True.. I know it too.. But as we age..it doesn’t matter…we should learn to laugh at ourselves too…But if it makes someone happy..Let it be.. At our age, we should be more mature to not think too much of it…Just let them be if it makes them happy…I have friends who are offended at little things..That’s why I hope I don’t want to be like them …Anyway….Thanks, bro, for your concern. I appreciate it,” the self-confessed simpleton said.
“Well, this is very generous of you then. Harmless bantering amongst friends is great, good to know you can laugh at yourself. That’s wisdom. Kindness is always the right response, so said Marcus Aurelius,” the old man replied.
” Marcus who? I’ve a feeling Marcus never said all that shit….” the simpleton replied.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” the notoriously temperamental chap commented, dismissing whatever the old man had just said. Something must have triggered him to become toxic and combative that moment. Old men are known to be grumpy and short-tempered but this level of disdain for fellow friends in a public forum felt inappropriate to the old man.
“Well, Lao Tzu said we ought to die daily and only then do we endure. I guess he meant that is the way we are reborn and learn to live the Way,” the old man explained.
“Lao Tzu said that? Are you sure you’re not just assuming?” the notoriously temperamental chap sneered.
“Lao Tzu also said he who grows weak was surely once strong and he who is kind has known the unkind,” the old man continued. He who is a bully must have been bullied, he thought about the man who had just condemned him to purgatory. He read somewhere that Nietzsche said equality leads to decline; the masses favour equality but equality loses us the incentives to excel. Nobility wants to stand out but so do bullies. Life is filled with opposites. Black and white, yin and yang, male and female, good and bad, tall and low, long and short, good friends and bullies.
They may belong to a group of old friends from school over fifty years ago. Most are friendly but some are not. That is obvious, Lao Tzu gave us plenty of insights into that. We are all different and the world encourages that. Life is like the sun and rain, impartial to the just and unjust. The ancient sage from two thousand six hundred years ago taught us to aspire to be like water, humble, clean and precious. Benefiting all, water occupies the low places that we dislike. It is soft yet can overcome the hard, universally good and impartial, it does not discriminate the good from the bad.
In recent months, something snapped in the group. The blighters and bullies had surfaced out of the woodwork and trampled on the recuperative camaraderie that had permeated the chats for a long time. More frequent vitriolic exchanges had enveloped the group, suffocated free speech and friendly discourse, bringing an air of defiance in some and outright belligerence in others. Some were sounding more inane veering on being insane, some were chastening feverishly and behaving with unusual pertinacity despite being loose with history and facts and the old man was particularly expostulatory at the rudeness and insults being thrown around. The vitriolic words cut deep, the brash and arrogant accusations repulsed and the mocking of the meek was vile and cancerous. The old man spoke up against a loudmouth who accused without justifications and tarnished reputations with egoistic abandon. Even nation states seek mutual respect and speak of instilling peace and harmony, the old man thought before telling his friends to show respect for one another.
“Our long friendships are special and precious, please do not destroy it,” he said to the loudmouth. Where is the willingness to accept our differences, the patience to listen without judging another, the respect for one another?” he asked.
“You don’t demand respect! RESPECT IS EARNED!” the loudmouth bellowed and justified his behaviour that honesty counted for more. Friends should be honest with one another, this is true, but he lacked tact, often failed to check the facts and acted like a trigger-happy judge. Low in humility, he simply assumed his assessments of people were always right and never kept in check his eagerness to harshly judge his friends. He went on to repeat his often-made accusations that the old man was a liar and a hypocrite. It was a defining moment for the old man. Accused repeatedly of being the bad person that he was not, and reasons for such accusations requested many times but never provided by his accuser, he had wrongly dismissed them as mere banter by a cantankerous old friend.
“Yes, you have called me a lying hypocrite many times. Normally I would walk away from such a person and think of him as crass, rude and unfriendly. You behaved like a brash bully in school but the way you still dismiss and ridicule people is a placard of your arrogance and disdain of others. Judging your friends incessantly doesn’t make you right, nor does it make you righteous. We won’t let people rape our bodies and I surely won’t let you abuse my mind. So, say what you like for whatever motives you have, but rest assured, I won’t lose any sleep over it let alone lose my peace. I’m just sad for you that you don’t value old friendships to want to tarnish a good friend’s reputation without reason and with reckless gung-ho arrogance,” the old man said to the loudmouth who had just unfriended him.
“I do value friendships but you are just too rich for my values. At best you are no more than a mere remote acquaintance. I am many things to many people but always steadfast in who and what I am. If that’s too much for you to bear, then you will have to deal with it in your own way and not expect me to comply to your expectations. Hopefully, with all that’s been said, we both know where we stand, never mind fake friendships,” said the loudmouth, tearing up a friendship that began in 1974.
Vladimir Lenin was famous for saying, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Stop repeating a lie, it won’t turn into a fact. It was only because the old man treated the loudmouth as an old friend, his best friend in Form 5 in fact, that he forgave him for the many insults he had dished out. Being venomous doesn’t make anyone right. He thought perhaps his friend was suffering from dementia to be so brutal and wrong in his judgments of people.
“Enough of your delusions as to how generous you are and what a good friend you are. I have learnt in life to detach as people, things and even family come and go. As time moves on, people change in all that life encompasses. I can and will only hold steadfast to my conscience and dignity, very little else,” the loudmouth continued.
“Omitaba, let this be a reminder to self, do not grow into a bitter and angry old man,” the old man chanted.
On that autumnal day, the old man found solace in Elgar’s music. The cello concerto, composed in the aftermath of the first world war, oozed a deep sense of melancholy and dark foreboding. It reflected his sombre and heavy mood and as he dwelled in his thoughts that madly swirled like a whirlpool in the darkness of his mind. With the growing awareness that his descent into the abyss was largely from the daily misery and horrendous news of the genocide that had been taking place in Gaza for over eight months, he looked up from his trance with knitted fading eyebrows and a serious face. The back neighbour’s big hound, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, was looking over their fence, half trampling on it, promising to break it in the not too distant future. His presence displeased the old man’s dog and the two animals began a frantic exchange of loud barks and growls not dissimilar to that between the old man and the loudmouth except the dogs showed a high degree of mutual respect. The old man’s dog was still wagging his tail.
Leave the genocide aside, he urged himself. The many debates about the holocaust, many of them hotly discussed and argued, had hollowed out the goodwill his friends had had for one another, it seemed to him. The great disturbance in the world had also reached the group of old men who had grown up together as schoolmates in Penang. There was growing impatience between the pro-Israel or zionist group and the anti-genocide or pro-peace group, smeared as the pro-Hamas terrorist group. They dragged religion into it. They dragged God into it – His promised land for His Chosen People. Was the promise unconditional and how would we define ‘chosen people’. They argued as the esteemed judges did in the International Court of Justice about what constituted a genocide. Some delved into the historical seeds of the unending conflict between the haves and have-nots, they dug up the Balfour Declaration, the centuries of peace under the Ottoman Turks prior to that, and right back to the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. But it was outside all those heated discussions that the old man discovered the most petty fact – Moses who was tasked with leading them to the Promised Land was himself barred from entering it, for breaking a rock for water rather than to simply talk to it, as instructed by God. If God could do that to Moses for disobeying a seemingly tepid command, why would God not bar today’s Israelis from the promised land since their sins are infinitely unforgivable. A genocide is after all, the greatest crime to humanity, surely a most vile human ability to be inhuman.
Leave the genocide aside, the old man again urged himself.
.
Urghhlings 