Several days ago a good friend and I exchanged texts.  He commented that he was his own worst enemy.  That is no trite expression.  How many ways subtle and not so subtle do we not undermine our own best interests?  We may arrive at a place of utter helplessness, realizing that there is no one to blame.  Blaming others, or circumstances, is a script that is so familiar in our hands when we chose to play the victim.  There is much competition for that role.  Have we not all held that script?

Despising others, conjuring up the enemy is something we learned very early, maybe as early as the unstructured, barely-supervised play in the school yard.  There is always a bully at hand, seeking a sign of weakness.

I agreed with my friend, because I can honestly say the same of myself.  I understood his comment as a positive, a move in the right direction.  For any reason, if and when we are able to pivot, and recognize our part in the unsatisfactory state of our lives, that flash of truth, of honesty is firm ground, firm enough to bear one’s weight.  Who has not done things of which they are ashamed?  Who has not entertained agendas, participated in programs, even wars which now haunt us?  The potential for atrocity, for taking action under a particular set of circumstances—that in hindsight we know was unambiguously destructive, is human.  I agreed unequivocally.

I once heard a quotation from Terence the Roman playwright many years ago which I have never forgotten.  Terence was brought to Rome as a slave, educated and later freed when his master recognized his abilities.

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto“, or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”

I will conclude with a few lines from Nietzsche’s, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

The encounter with the ugliest man has just concluded.  Nietzsche walks away with much on his mind.  The conversation between them has been about the depth and range of muck entailed at the bottom of the self.  Such a discovery merits both revulsion, shame, and also great love.  This is the paradox of being human, the point of the encounter between the two characters.

Consider these closing lines of the tale….

Zarathustra ….. went his way, more thoughtfully and slowly even than before: for he asked himself many things, and hardly knew what to answer.

“How poor indeed is man,” he thought in his heart, “how ugly, how wheezy, how full of hidden shame!

They tell me that man loves himself. Ah, how great must that self-love be! How much contempt is opposed to it!

Even this man has loved himself, as he hath despised himself,—a great lover I am certain that he is, and a great despiser.

I have found no one yet who more thoroughly despised himself: even that is elevation.

Alas, was this perhaps the higher man whose cry I heard?

I love the great despisers. Man is something that has to be surpassed.”——

—excerpt Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, No. 67 The Ugliest Man p. 258