Shock and backlash, the action that generates the reaction or as Meryl Streep summarized well when she received the Golden Globe “Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence”. Understanding this mecanism in which every part of us in some way difficult to predict, comes back back like a boomerang, is the brake that many of us needs.
Thinking better about what we are going to say, re-reading what we have just written, accessing the multiple interpretations of what we say can generate (and from this we can decide if it’s really worth going ahead) and trying to understand what comes to us without contradicting to established facts, shows profound wisdom. But this is really difficult…
Generally acquired with age, when we used to have free time to make mistakes, to suffer defeats , to lick our wounds and then learn from the experience, maturity is increasingly required sooner in life. We have never made such mistakes, suffered such defeats or hurt others so much. The impression is that given the speed of thing, the intensity which everything arrives and a volume that is increasingly more difficult to bear on shoulders that are simply incapable of carrying the weight of the modern world… That we have learned nothing! We invariably end up making the same mistakes.
Meryl Streep offered a path for us all. In the same way that disrespect and violent attitudes are replicated, love, tolerance, patient and respect are likewise replicated. The exercise doesn’t begin in crying over a lost society or over the generation facing no life or over soul-less governments, but exactly in valuing those things that we have to improve and are issued (and return!) from each of us.
The boomerang works in a way that appears simple, but in fact is far from it: “where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy”. And that all of us “seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned”.