You know Kirby, right? The Nintendo character?
If you’re unfamiliar, let me introduce you. All you need to know about Kirby is that he’s a sort of of pinkish blob who goes around defeating bad guys and collecting coins. Kind of like Mario, except for one very distinct difference: Kirby sucks.
No, I mean literally. Like a vacuum cleaner. That’s why they named him Kirby, get it?
In order to defeat bad guys, Kirby opens his mouth wide and sucks them in with incredible force, and then he spits them back out to smash barriers, knock out other bad guys, trip traps, or pretty much anything else. (He can also float for a time by sucking in air, like a balloon.)
Actually, there’s another trick Kirby has, and that’s what prompted me to write this article. Kirby doesn’t have to spit out the enemies he engulfs. He can also, well, swallow them.
He sucks in a bad guy, and if he so desires (more accurately, if you, as the player, desires), he can sort of squash his body down, and the enemy simply vanishes inside his soft pink form. I suppose it’s swallowing, but it could be a form of matter annihilation. Who knows?
The other day, I was getting irritated about something that happened to me. Someone said something very rude, and my instinct was to come back at them with the same tone. To meet rudeness with rudeness.
It’s what many of us are hard-wired to do.
But then I thought of Kirby, and I realized there was another option. I could just swallow that feeling down. Destroy it. Obliterate it within myself, like it never existed.
The same thing is true for any emotion that rises up inside us–because, of course, the “rudeness” I felt coming from the aforementioned person wasn’t really coming from them, it was being created inside myself in response to their words.
They didn’t implant anything inside me that wasn’t already there.
So when anger forms, or jealousy, or regret, or just plain old irritation, just remember you have a choice. You can either open your mouth and let it fly, and see how much damage you can do. Or you can squash it down, swallow it, make it no more, and go about your day.
I prefer the latter option, personally. What you put out into your environment, you have a 100% higher chance of running into again; but what you keep inside, and digest, you remove from your life forever.
Some might criticize this advice, saying that what I’m advocating is “stuffing your feelings down” and “forgetting about them.” They would say that’s unhealthy. It’s much healthier to let things out in the open.
I disagree, obviously.
First of all, I’m not suggesting anyone should hide their feelings like unwanted broccoli under the kitchen table. I’m not advising you to bottle things up. That, certainly, is very unhealthy.
But there’s another option to dealing with unwanted emotions that doesn’t involve subjecting anyone else to them, and that is to simply recognize them for the formless, powerless blobs of thought that they are, and to force them to dissipate.
Emotions aren’t real. They don’t exist. They don’t come to you from outside sources, and they cannot exist outside of your own mind. You may use words laced with emotion, but those are only suggestions to the people who hear your words that they should create corresponding emotions inside themselves. (Think of the transporters in Star Trek. When Kirk steps onto the pad and gets “beamed up,” the transporter isn’t physically taking his particles from one place to another. According to some sources, at least, what the machine does is break down the particles of Kirk, record the information the contain, and then transmit that information to the destination, where a whole new set of particles are put together to make a copy of Kirk.)
Emotions are not real. I can’t stress it enough.
And you can’t bury something that isn’t real. You can’t hide something that doesn’t exist.
What you can do is turn your flashlight on it and realize that there is no there there.
Or, to bring it back around to my original metaphor, you swallow it down and make it disappear.
Next time you feel something unpleasant, ask yourself where the emotion came from, and if it’s worth putting out there in the world.
And when you realize it’s not, just Kirby it.
PS – Christians may equate what I’m saying to “turning the other cheek,” but there is an importance difference in philosophy to address here.
While I do sympathize with the sentiment, turning the other cheek implies accepting abuse. In fact, the thought isn’t so much implied as it is stated clearly in Matthew 5:39, “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”
I’m not interested in advocating masochism. I see no reason to open yourself up to more abuse from “an evil person.”
In the Stoic’s eyes, there is no such thing as an evil person. Marcus Aurelius might say that there are only people who cannot recognize good from evil. Assuming we’re talking about a metaphorical slap here, if someone slaps you on the right cheek, just understand that their feelings are not your feelings; their path is not your path; their injury is not your injury.
Because, as Aurelius says, “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
Christianity advocates not only accepting oneself as being a victim, but in making oneself a victim in the first place–neither of which are necessary, or even possible, under Stoicism.
But I digress.
The Vulcan Buddha 