nothing passes through you for free

on attention, and reactivity

Someone said something mean to me a while back, and I replied to it. That was a mistake. Standing up for yourself is not wrong, if anything it felt reasonable in the moment, even righteous. But my mistake was that by answering I agreed to keep that conversation going. I carried it home. I rehearsed better versions of my reply in the shower, on the walk to the subway station, in the gap before falling asleep where the mind goes looking for something to chew. The person who said it had probably forgotten it by lunch. I kept it in my head for a month.

Whatever you permit, persists. Whatever you put up with takes root. And what you turn toward, what you answer back, what you let yourself become interested in, that continues most of all. Attention is not a neutral act. It is closer to feeding. What are you feeding your energy and time.

Show people your anger often enough and they will begin to handle you as an angry person. They will test the edge of it, press on it to see if it holds, learn to expect it and then to provoke it and then to apologize to it in advance. Show them your delight just as freely and they will start performing for the delight, bringing you small things to be pleased by, measuring themselves against your face. Either way you have handed them a version of yourself to react to. You are no longer a neutral surface. You are a known quantity, and now your days fill up with the work of deciding whether to accept their reading of you or to fight it, when there is another option, and that is to simply not acknowledge the feeling so loudly in the first place.

Marcus Aurelius wrote a line, the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. He meant it almost as a physical fact. The mind is a cloth, and whatever you steep it in for long enough leaves its color behind. Steep it in grievance and you become a person the world starts to look grieved to. Steep it in suspicion and everything already suspect. He was describing a stain, the way something repeated often enough stops passing through you and starts becoming you.

Whatever you take part in takes part in you. We tend to imagine we can engage with something and stay outside of it, the way you might dip a hand into water and pull it back out dry. Participation does not work like that. Get into one fight and you will find the next one already knows your address. Take up the habit of debate and the debates multiply, because you have advertised yourself as someone who reliably shows up for them. Start thinking solemnly about whether your life amounts to anything, and suddenly the question is everywhere, in the traffic and the grocery line and the face of someone you love across the table, because you have trained your attention to hunt for it. You see, in the end, what you have agreed to see.

Which brings me to the harder version of all this. There are things in the world that are genuinely repulsive, genuinely worth standing against, and the instinct when they reach for us is to grab back. To be so bothered, so personally offended, that we take hold of the thing with both hands and let it, in turn, take hold of us. This feels like integrity. It feels like caring enough to be wounded. But to be touched that deeply by what repels you is to let it inside, and once it is inside it does the only thing anything you let inside does. It continues. It dyes the cloth. You can spend an entire year so consumed by what you despise that you begin, in the privacy of your own head, where no one is watching, to resemble it.

The Stoics had a cleaner instinct here, and it is the part of them worth keeping. You can set yourself against a thing and still keep it from getting in. You can rinse it off before it dries. The hands matter, and I want to be clear about that. This is not a quiet argument for doing nothing, for floating in some private calm above a world that is burning. Act. Oppose. Refuse where refusing is right. But there is a difference between the act and the residue, between fighting a thing and being colored by it, and that difference is nearly the whole of the matter. The first is work, and work leaves you intact. The second is a slow conversion, over months you will not notice as they pass, into the very thing you set out to fight.

I think about the comment sometimes. I did not need to answer it. Or I could have answered it the once, briefly, and then let it go down the drain with the rest of the day’s water. What kept it alive was never the person who said it. It was me, turning it over, feeding it, letting it set up in the part of me where things take root and stay. The world will hand you a great deal you never asked for. You cannot always govern what reaches you.

You can govern what you keep.

Whatever you let settle inside you keeps going. So be wary, almost superstitious, about what you wave past the door. Not because you are fragile, but because you are the cloth, and the color, once it takes, is the one you will have to live inside.

— Pearl

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