We Need Softer Hearts, Not Softer Minds
The strongest people aren't the toughest—they're the most honest with themselves.
When I was younger, my mind was weak. I was easily angered, easily upset. The world, in my opinion, constantly wronged me or misinterpreted me, but what I didn’t realise was that I was wronging myself and misinterpreting my own actions, as we do when we are young.
At the same time, I could be mean, unthoughtful, disingenuous, a complete ass, and my mind wasn’t strong enough to admit that. The external world was the issue. People were my problem. I did this because they did this.
A hard heart dismisses the pain and suffering of others, and a soft mind coddles our own ineptitude as a human and strokes our ego to keep it feeling strong.
As we grow, through understanding useful but incomplete frameworks like psychology or religion, we can decide to learn our lessons and understand how we and others tick, we become more understanding of our own flawed minds, our nature, and our humanity. We become a little more real with ourselves, and a little more compassionate towards others.
The difficult mother is seen through the lens of being a flawed human rather than mean, cold, and heartless. The teacher is seen through a human lens rather than someone above and beyond our own understanding.
We go from looking at ourselves through the lens of the ideal self, ignoring, justifying, and rationalising all our shitty behaviour as just, true, righteous, and deserved.
Because we are more aware of our nature, we become, at one and the same time, more honest with ourselves while also becoming more caring and compassionate. Our worth is no longer tied to the untruths we tell ourselves to keep ourselves feeling strong. We are stronger because we are less judgemental, more forgiving, more understanding, and more knowledgeable about our own heart and mind and those of others.
We can see our positive and negative attributes without overidentifying with them.
We gain greater insight into our own flawed, sinful nature and connect that to being a flawed human rather than being fundamentally wrong, inadequate, defective, evil, or a tainted spirit in a pure realm. We see everything as broken, and we are part of that brokeness. We become aware that we are all universally troubled, misguided, biased, compulsive, driven by dangerous impulses, and emotional as human beings.
Through that insight, we can better take hold of these inequities and stand a little freer from them through awareness, restraint, self-care, and kindness.
Others’ opinions of us, whether good or bad, no longer inflate us or shrink us because we have a clearer picture of who we are through that hard-earned insight.
Our minds must be strong enough and wise enough to see our own folly, and to minimise the folly we produce, while our hearts must remain gentle enough not to dehumanise ourselves or those we share life with.
It is not that we no longer judge. We all judge. But that judgement comes with an awareness of the nature of humanity, and with a critical understanding of our own judgements and the realisation that they are inevitably misguided.
We begin to see the other person through the lens of being another flawed human with the same need for love, compassion, understanding, kindness, and care.
I see men my age around me reaching 50, still believing in the mantra of go hard or go home, still trying to present as strong because the fragility of their minds causes them to project an image of manliness and strength.
Their hearts are hard towards others as they judge the world through an overly critical lens, when, in reality, they are fragile because they themselves cannot truly live up to their own standards.