Spencer Hu
shu2@uwyo.edu
Just the other night I was having a heart-to-heart with my friend who told me he was struggling with his drug use. Not necessarily that his use was getting in the way of him being effective in society but rather, he just thought that he shouldn’t do it anymore. He kept saying that he wanted to be more present in the spiritual aspects of his life and despite that, he kept slipping back into doing drugs. He enjoys and detests both behaviors in equal parts, obviously for different reasons.
The most troubling aspect was that the two behaviors weren’t truly in opposition with one another—they weren’t mutually exclusive. By participating in both he felt he wasn’t genuinely participating in either, at least not to the extent he wanted. Of course this is all my interpretation of what he was saying. I felt for him. I didn’t know exactly how he felt but I could relate in the dimension that I’ve similarly been pulled in what feels like opposing directions before.
I offered him some unsolicited advice. I said that he ultimately had to choose to just participate in one of his two conflicting behaviors. I’m going to say that I don’t condone drug abuse, as if anyone would. What I proposed was that he should choose one of the two options and do it whole-heartedly. He can either do all the drugs he wants (responsibly), having fun, because it’s valid to do so in the eyes of some, or he could drop those behaviors and pursue his spirituality in the same capacity without aid of drugs, because that is also valid.
Oftentimes we obsess over what is “right and wrong,” when the reality is that we can’t truly know what actions or behaviors are truly right and wrong. When we make a decision, we live in the reality where when we make that decision, we don’t get to know what making the opposing decision would really be like. What we are allowed to know is whether or not the decision we made is justified, if the feelings we had when making the decision were motivated by things that mattered.
My friend was concerned with right and wrong—something that we are all too concerned with. This is not because it isn’t important, but because it isn’t something we can’t hope to know or measure. Always feeling the pressure of having to adhere to the “right” thing to do is not only punishing, but also entirely impractical. I used to make decisions that would end in a result that would be sub-optimal. When I compare these sub-optimal results from the decision I chose with what I believed the results of the alternative decision would have been, the sub-optimal results of the chosen decision never quite matched up with the optimistic, hypothetical optimal result of the alternative. Who would have guessed? It might seem obvious when I put it like that, but before I said it out loud to myself, the two things seemed proper to compare and I was always less fulfilled because of it.
Now I make decisions and allow myself to be fulfilled by the results regardless of how they compare with my vision. I recognize my nature, as a rational thinking human being, who justifies his thoughts and actions. That in itself has to be good enough. Doing anything else is only self-loathing. Yes, we should regret bad decisions and we should care about the results of our actions, but when situations erase the lines of right and wrong that we once thought were constant, we should revel in ambiguity and embrace the unknown.
