As someone who has spent a long time of their life being a people pleaser, I always wrestled with the question “how much love is the right amount of love to give?”. I would hang out with a friend and we would have a wonderful time together and then we would part ways. I would come home and find that there is this lingering feeling of ‘should I have done more for that friend? Should I have spoken up a little bit more about how much I care for that friend?’
Soon I realized that there is no real end to this kind of thought because some days I would actually dedicate so much of my effort to making sure that my friend knows how much I appreciate them, only to come home and find that the remorse stays all the same.
Just like everything else this has a binary. If I can care too much about other people, it is also possible to care too little about other people. What is the middle way in between those two binaries?
A good and somewhat morbid way to think about this is, thinking about death. Why death? Because even for Billy, death is fairly extreme to jump to from the get go. To motivate why we arrive at death let’s think about this hypothetical scenario: what if this is the last time I see them?
As long as they're alive there's a chance I could see my friends, but they could move or I could move. When I was in elementary school that effectively meant the end of the relationship. Nowadays with social media and everything you can continue to keep in touch with people who are physically away from you if you want to. But even then, if I never get to physically see somebody again… That would still make me feel a little bit sad. Especially when I recollect the last time I saw that person in person I would have a little bit of remorse like, “oh man,if I had only known that this will be the last time I would have done something more genuine. I would have engaged in a little bit more of a sincere way”.
Then we extend that line of thought to arrive at what if this is the last time I talked to them in a very long time? So now we go from physical location to no contact, and that sucks a little bit too because ideally I want to be close to my friends. I want to be able to keep in touch with them and if I can't — that would feel pretty bad.
Extending this line of thought to its extreme we arrive at death. What if I never see this person again and I can never communicate with this person ever again in my lifetime? I would have a lot of remorse, not just a little bit of remorse. Is there a way to not suffer from that situation?
Of course we can just take the idea that we didn't know that death was going to happen to them and we did everything we can with the knowledge we had at the time. Unfortunately it doesn't take a genius to know that death is inevitable for everybody.
So as we know about this inevitable faith called death, why do we still engage with people as if we are guaranteed a next time to see them? The more I thought about death of my own life in meditations, the more I also thought about the death of the people who are closest to me.
I think I wrote about this before but I know that I am going to be very heartbroken when my wife dies. But I decided to love her even knowing that that was going to happen, so I would have no remorse. This sounds weird but while I will feel sad about her passing, I won't find myself thinking that the universe is cruel for taking her away because I am well aware of this knowledge that she will one day pass at an unexpected time (or rather an inconvenient time).
I make sure that I live my life in a way that I will not regret how I treated my wife in the last moment (which tends to make me not regret how I treated my wife in my lifetime). With that, I can go on an extreme here: if I burst into tears every time I talk to my wife that would be a little bit too much of a waste of my emotional energy. While she can die at any moment just like how nothing guarantees her life, nothing really guarantees her death today.
So what's the practical middle ground when it comes to not being too sad every time I see a loved one? For that we lean into what would I regret the most? what kind of a final moment would I regret the most?
I asked myself this and it would be a moment of anger. I say things that I don't mean when I get so consumed by my rage and decide to try my best and hurt the other person. Yeah, I would regret that pretty hard.
The nuance here is, if I actually don’t like them — who cares? I can make them angry and let them know how much I hate them. So in that way, you can leave someone with the idea that you hate them and have no problems. But what if you DON’T actually hate them, but you like them? You love them? In that case, what would be the only realistic reason you’d do things you’ll regret to them? When you get consumed by a strong emotion like anger.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like regretting. That’s almost the entire reason why I started practicing Buddhism to change my life. The right amount of love lives in between deep regrets of expressing anger and being super sad about future death every time. Relationships don’t exist for you to suffer, so there is no reason for you to subscribe to either one of these extremes.
Thinking of relationships with mortality in mind, while it sounds super doom-y it has made me appreciate every life around me. I hope you can be loving enough to hope that you can see them again, and loving enough to let a reason to be angry slide by.