The work of Eckhart Tolle, especially his book The Power of Now has had a slowly growing impact on how I think about human behavior, my own and that of other people. Tolle talks about how much of our response to people and situations comes from a need to defend our own egos. While this is an easy idea to process intellectually, it is much harder to apply the insight as conversation plays out in daily life and often you can see ego-defensiveness better in other people’s behavior than in your own.
When you catch ego defensiveness in your own behavior, you feel the need to override spontaneity by supervising yourself so that no little ego-driven nastiness slips out. It’s easiest to do when there is some nagging little doubt about the niceness of what you’re about to say, although I believe that no matter how loving and conscientious you are, unkindness will occasionally get by your inner censor.
Gradually the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle has been getting through to me and I find myself a little more able to let go of the need to defend myself and my opinions. This played out not long ago in an encounter I had with my father’s physician. There had been a mix-up in the prescribing of an antibiotic for my father and the doctor yelled at me, “And you didn’t follow up on it?” He was really very loud and very nasty. I could see the shocked look on the faces of his staff as I left.
A younger me would have been devastated by his unkindness, but now I have enough wisdom to distance myself and simply thought “My goodness, this man has an anger issue.” The next time Dad and I saw him, he was sweet as sugar to us and I could see he regretted his outburst of bad behavior. It was not hard to forgive him because I knew it had stemmed from a desire to take good care of my father.