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Today's
quotation:
Something of vengeance I had tasted
for the first time; as aromatic
wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavor,
metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation
as if I had been poisoned.
Charlotte Brontė
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Today's
Meditation:
Revenge
tends either to be a heat-of-the-moment thing or something
that a person plans for a long, long time. In the
heat of the moment, it seems somewhat understandable for
someone to want to "get back" at another person
who has hurt them somehow. Revenge is the result of
emotion then, something that hasn't been thought out-- and
when it's done, one has to live with the consequences of
having purposely hurt another human being. This can
be especially difficult for someone who considers her- or
himself to be a kind and compassionate person. The
action of the heat of the moment contradicts completely
the kind of person they claim to be.
When
one has time to plan revenge, one is purposely abandoning
kindness and compassion and working actively to hurt
someone else. Perhaps that person has hurt them, and
that's why they want revenge. If that's the case, we
have to admit that another person's actions have caused us
to abandon our authentic selves and to lose our
integrity-- instead of acting the ways we know we should,
we make a great effort to hurt someone. Living with
this type of revenge can be even more difficult because of
the purposeful nature of what we've done. We've had
plenty of time to take the higher road and forgive and
move on, but we've chosen instead to hold on to our anger
and harm someone else.
Bronte
warns us of the aftertaste of revenge. We may feel a
self-righteous justification for what we're doing, but how
are we going to feel knowing that we've done what we've
done, that another person's actions have caused us to
compromise our integrity and our virtue? I know that
the few times that I've felt a need to take revenge on
someone else, the moment might have felt somewhat
satisfying, but immediately I was struck by the cognitive
dissonance that must result when one performs an action
that goes against his or her values.
Revenge
brings me no satisfaction, and I suspect that very few
people feel good about having hurt another person, no
matter what that other person might have done. I
don't want to compromise my own happiness and satisfaction
with life by doing something that I know to be wrong, so I
choose to make sure that revenge is not something that I
seek, no matter what the circumstances.
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