[40Days] #11: When I look into your heart...
Short answer: Not much
Longer answer: Different choices.
I don't have enemies any more, which is not to say there aren't probably a few people who consider *themselves* to be my enemies. IN truth, my life is too ahort and too full of more important people to waste time expending energy on the kind of sustained hate that qualifies someone as an enemy. There are people around whom I don't find I enjoy myself, people whose values are so different from mine that I find attempts to make conversation on safe common ground to be awkward or even unwelcome. There are others, whose frequently-repeating stories of self-indulgent woe and unaddressed problem saturation become something I'm increasingly unwilling to sit and listen to unless I'm being paid. But classic "enemies"? Not so much. My passions are something I understand and engage far more effectively at this stage of my life than I used to. So when this question asks, "What's the difference when I look between our hearts?", the obvious answer is, "We've made different choices", and one of them may be that I have addressed and/or released the precipitating situation for the enmity, and mine "enemy" has not.
I could get into the ideas of differentiation and fusion as well (one cannot declare themselves to be anyone's "enemy" without by necessity fusing themselves emotionally and psychologically to the source of that hatred, and I'm reasonably sure there isn't anyone any more to whom that definition applies in my life. There are those who have in the past and likely will continue to talk shit about me - once upon a time, I had a reputation and behavioral pattern that earned it, and while I've changed over the years, not everyone has been so willing to revisit and update their mental opinions of me, something I learned as recently as yesterday - but part of the differentiation processes of the last baker's dozen years of self-development have included disengaging from the need to self-validate through the opinions of others. The flippant statement is that "I don't care what others think", but in truth, it's more that I choose not to let someone's poor opinions of me (contemporary or historical), affect what I choose to do with my life or the people about whom I care. The trick, I have learned, is to handle that particular form of disregard with care and grace... and *that's* an area that perhaps needs more consistent monitoring and tweaking.
An enemy, still emotionally fused with me, is going to be somehow *very* enmeshed in caring about what *I* do or say. That, too, is indicative of those different choices. But all that aside, when I look into the heart of any such person, I expect what I will see more than anything else is another human being full of hopes and hurts, delights and disappointments, endeavours and expectations. There will be values on which we might agree and those on which we likely will not. They will, by many accounts, look a lot like me, even as the particulars vary, perhaps greatly. And because there is such similarity, even with those aggrieved differences, there can be compassion.
Most days, I will even resist the temptation to make it the type of compassion that is delivered at the end of a shovel.
http://www.marcandangel.com/2012/04/13/40-questions-everyone-is-afraid-to-ask/
[Since I missed yesterday, today will likely be a twofer, but I'll wait until after I've had more coffee to attempt a second one.]