An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.
One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
It's only bad because you use a negative term like "feed" where I can counter it just like I did before by using the word compassion. And we're playing another game of semantics because there are no inherently good or evil emotions.
Ugh, so let's go through this again: over consuming any emotion is dangerous. The right amount of self compassion and the right about of self respect and the right amount of righteous anger and the right amount of guilt is good an the right about of regret is good.
This is where you say, "But too much guilt is bad and too much ego is bad". And people have committed war crimes over love.
And too much sodium is bad, but that doesn't make sodium evil either.
You keep saying self compassion. I have never heard self pity referenced like that before. Not passing any judgement, just new to me. LOL - it's okay friend, metaphors are supposed to evoke thought and discussion - and here we the participants and audience may find value from this interaction in our irl world in the future. The goal is to not get worked up reasserting your point as you'll likely "feed" the vapors parts of the metaphorical wolf.
Yes I do keep saying compassion because it's another word for pity, which illustrates a point that we are playing with semantics. Self pity = self compassion and it's not a bad thing if managed with emotional maturity. It's not evil and it's not good, it's just human.
I agree that I shouldn't need to have made the same argument 50 fucking times.
Ugh. I'm guessing this will be the next rebuttal.
LMAO s'all good friend. Full admission on my part and likely due to the last 100 years of western civ; pity doesn't resonate as positively with me as the word compassion. Again, semantics. Maybe instead of using the word "Evil", we should use the word "Sin" for this metaphor. ie to Self Pity can be a SIN; where as the act itself is not necessarily evil though. That said, I'm not sure the Cherokees had "Sin", so "Evil" in this context may already represent such.